The Monte Verde controversy is back: who first lived in the Americas?

Illustration of the Monte Verde people Julieta Torres/www. indaga. me This is an extract from Our Human Story, our about the revolution in archaeology.  receive it in your inbox every month. In every scientific field, there are totemic places. The CERN physics laboratory that houses the Large Hadron Collider; the Cavendish lab in Cambridge where James Watson and Francis Crick did their research on the structure of DNA; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. In archaeology, one such place is a site in Chile called Monte Verde. For half a century, Monte Verde has been central to our understanding of the peopling of the Americas. For two decades, the story that Monte Verde told was wildly controversial. It then became fairly settled, but, as of this year, it has become controversial again. The details of the new argument are, at times, punishingly technical, and I’m going to give only the roughest outline of them or we’d be here all week. However, the actual questions at the back of all this are simple: who were the first people to live in the Americas, and when did they arrive? The Americas were the last continents to be settled by humans. (Well, there’s Antarctica, but given it was discovered only within the last 300 years, let’s not worry about it.) The oldest known hominins lived in Africa, and we don’t see hard evidence of hominins anywhere else until 1.8 million years ago, when Homo erectus reached what is now Georgia – the one in Eurasia, not the US state. Later, hominins like Neanderthals and Denisovans spread throughout Eurasia. Later still, our species, Homo sapiens, appeared in Africa and migrated all over Eurasia. That’s a lot of travelling around, over a period of nearly 2 million years. Yet none of those people seem to have reached the Americas. While the exact timing of that momentous landfall is very contentious, we are talking at most about the last 35,000 years – and the main waves of settlement seem to have been between 20,000 and 13,000 years ago. That’s where Monte Verde comes in. It has long been claimed to be the oldest evidence of humans in the Americas – or at least the oldest one with indisputable traces of human intervention and reliable dating evidence. Monte Verde told us that people entered the Americas thousands of years earlier than previously thought. Now, the archaeological data at the site is under attack – and with it, our understanding of the prehistory of the Americas.