Reevaluating Human Prehistory in the Americas
A groundbreaking new study has once again challenged established views on the timeline of human presence in the Americas.
For many years, the dominant theory regarding human arrival in the Western Hemisphere focused on the Clovis culture, which is believed to have crossed the Beringia land bridge from Asia between 13,400 and 12,800 years ago before expanding southward.
However, this theory was first questioned in 1977 when an archaeological site in southern Chile was excavated. Monte Verde, located near the city of Puerto Montt, was dated to approximately 14,500 years ago, making it a significant outlier that suggested human populations existed in the far south of the continent well before the Clovis people’s arrival.
New Findings Challenge Monte Verde’s Age
Recent research has now revised this understanding. A team of archaeologists has found evidence indicating that Monte Verde may be less than half as old as previously believed. This revision places the north-to-south expansion theory back at the forefront of ongoing debates about the human history of the Americas.
Dr. Todd Surovell, from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming and lead author of the study published on Thursday in Science, remarked on the significance of Monte Verde in shaping archaeological thought.
“Monte Verde was the anchor for the idea that people were in South America before we see the appearance of the Clovis complex in North America – and for the entirety of my career that has been the case.”
Surovell’s interest in Monte Verde began when Tom Dillehay, the original excavator of the site, presented his findings to a graduate class at the University of Wisconsin. These findings were subsequently validated by a multidisciplinary team.
Despite this, Surovell developed skepticism about Monte Verde’s dating as his career progressed, questioning the anomaly that had shifted the paradigm regarding the timing and route of human arrival in the Americas.
The new study concludes that Monte Verde was misdated due to soil erosion processes that caused more recent archaeological materials to be deposited in older geological layers. Consequently, the site is now estimated to be between 6,000 and 8,000 years old.
Implications for Understanding Human Migration
Dr. Claudio Latorre, a paleoecologist at the Universidad Católica’s Biological Sciences Faculty in Santiago, commented on the impact of Monte Verde’s original discovery.
“When it was discovered, Monte Verde turned the entire story of the population of the Americas on its head.
“All of a sudden you had a site in southern Chile that’s 1,500 years older than the oldest sites in North America, and there was this huge gap in our knowledge – the understanding that the population of the Americas would have come from north to south was basically chucked out of the window.”
Monte Verde was initially excavated between 1977 and 1985 by Dillehay and his colleagues, who maintained permits for the site.
Following the expiration of these original permits, Surovell and his team obtained permission to conduct the first independent survey of Monte Verde since the initial excavations. Their findings challenge the previously accepted age of the site, effectively questioning the anomaly that Monte Verde represented.
While other pre-Clovis sites have been discovered and excavated across the Americas—from Mexico to northwest Argentina and Uruguay—none have yet been independently verified.
Surovell emphasized the importance of further examination of these sites to advance understanding of American prehistory.
“I want to have the second set of eyes on these sites, but I don’t want to be the archaeological angel of death,”
“I much prefer to be in the business of knowledge production, which our work at Monte Verde does by erasing this one data point.”
