Monte Verde Challenges Ideas About the First Americans

In the mid-1970s, local farmers near Chinchihuapi Creek in the Los Lagos Region of southern Chile came across large animal bones and sent them to the Universidad Austral de Chile. The remains were identified as the remains of Notiomastodon, an extinct relative of modern elephants. In 1977, Tom Dillehay, an American anthropologist teaching at the Universidad Austral de Chile, began formal excavations along the creek. His investigations revealed an open-air archaeological site preserved beneath an anaerobic peat bog. The oxygen-poor conditions had halted the normal decay of organic material, protecting perishable structural remains, animal tissue, and plant matter that rarely survive across millennia.

The primary focus of excavation became the upper archaeological layer, designated Monte Verde II. Radiocarbon dates on bone and charcoal from the site, first reported in 1979, came out at more than 14,000 years before present, and the occupation is now generally placed around 14,500 years ago. These results directly challenged the prevailing academic consensus known as the Clovis-first model, which held that humans first entered the Americas around 13,000 years ago through an interior ice-free corridor in North America. Because Monte Verde lay thousands of miles south of the Bering land bridge and appeared to predate Clovis sites by at least a millennium, Dillehay's initial findings were met with widespread skepticism.