ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 11, 1997 TAG: 9702110067
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Dallas Morning News
A team of archaeologists has concluded that humans lived in southern Chile 12,500 years ago - more than 1,000 years earlier than most scientists had believed possible.
The finding suggests that researchers may have to radically revise their ideas of how humans migrated into the New World, the scientists say.
``This is probably the biggest change in North American archaeology in 50 years,'' said Alex Barker, curator of archaeology at the Dallas Museum of Natural History. Barker coordinated an expedition last month to a site known as Monte Verde, about 500 miles south of Santiago, Chile.
``I feel very elated about all this,'' said Thomas Dillehay, a University of Kentucky archaeologist who excavated Monte Verde from 1977 to 1985.
Ten archaeologists, including Barker and Dillehay, visited the site in early January. Their goal was to determine whether Monte Verde was older than any other known settlement in the Americas.
The other oldest confirmed sites of human habitation in the New World date to about 11,200 years ago. That's within the time period known as the ``Clovis horizon,'' named after the distinctive fluted spearpoints found in Clovis, N.M.
Sites containing Clovis spearpoints are found across North America. For 60 years, archaeologists have believed that the sites recorded the spread of humans into the New World 11,200 years ago.
Most archaeologists have thought that humans migrated across a land bridge that connected Asia to Alaska 12,000 years ago, when sea levels were lower. From Alaska, humans took several hundred years to spread southward through the Americas.
The implications of the Monte Verde conclusions are profound, archaeologists say.
If humans were living at the southern end of Chile 12,500 years ago, then they certainly couldn't have gotten there by crossing the land bridge 12,000 years ago.
``You're not just 1,000 years older than Clovis sites, you're also 10,000 miles away from the land bridge,'' said David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University.
The Monte Verde humans might have gotten there by some other route, such as by boat across the South Pacific - although Meltzer said that scenario was unlikely. Or they may have migrated across the land bridge much earlier, about 20,000 years ago, before the bridge was shut off by ice. (It then reopened 12,000 years ago.)
Humans also may have lived in villages near Monte Verde. But no other ancient sites are known in the area, possibly because no one has looked for the evidence, Dillehay said.
Several archaeologists have found other sites in the Americas that seem to be older than the Clovis horizon. But none of these sites has held up under scrutiny.
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