GoKawiilA landmark site in the peopling of the Americas is several thousand years younger than we thought. While that means very different things about the site itself, it doesn’t change the big picture as much as the researchers who generated the new date are claiming.
University of Wyoming archaeologist Todd Surovell and his colleagues recently took a second look at the age of a site called Monte Verde in southern Chile, and it turns out that people lived there 8,000 years ago—not 14,500, as the archaeologists who first described it claimed.
Monte Verde is about as far from the Bering Land Bridge as you can get without leaving the continents, so its age was the first piece of evidence that people were well-established in the Americas before the end of the last Ice Age. But it hasn’t been the last, so Surovell and his colleagues’ findings don’t actually change what we now know about the peopling of the Americas—and they definitely don’t put the “Clovis First” hypothesis back on the table.
It’s old, but exactly how old?
In 1997, a team of archaeologists sent shockwaves through the field by publishing radiocarbon dates for an ancient campsite in southern Chile, which they claimed was around 14,500 years old. The dates seemed impossible because at the time, most archaeologists agreed that there was no one in the Americas at all, let alone in southern Chile, until at least 13,000 years ago. But later studies matched the original radiocarbon dates.
Specifically (and this bit of detail will be important later), the dates showed that bits of wood and seaweed in the layer of sediment covering the archaeological site were around 14,500 years old. That seemed to suggest the sediment layer itself was 14,500 years old, which meant the site itself was at least that old.