The discovery of Monte Verde, a prehistoric settlement site in Chile, has led some archaeologists to suggest that humans may have lived in South America more than 33,000 years ago.
Archaeologists have found a number of sites of human occupation in North and South America that date to approximately 11,200 years ago. The North American, or Clovis, sites show that people in widely separated settlements made virtually identical tools. These similarities have led some archaeologists to theorize that Clovis people were migratory hunters who entered the Americas relatively recently and spread across North America very rapidly. Other scholars have suggested that such rapid population movement in an unfamiliar continent would have been impossible. They suggest that dental, linguistic, and genetic diversity within modern Indian populations suggest that humans must have been present long before Clovis. The similarity of technology at Clovis sites, in this view, may represent the development of new toolmaking methods, not population movements.
Many candidates have been suggested as pre-Clovis sites, but most have been discredited. The most likely pre-Clovis site is Monte Verde, Chile. At Monte Verde, discovered in the 1970s, archaeologists found two sites that indicated early human occupation. One dated to about 12,500 years ago, more than a thousand years before Clovis. This site contained evidence of a group of about 20 to 30 people who hunted mastodons, made tools, gathered medicinal plants, and lived in a long structure made of animal hides and wood. If the dating of this site is correct, it would suggest that humans may have crossed into the Americas from Asia more than 20,000 years ago. Their second discovery was even more controversial. In another area of the same site, they found charcoal from burned clay. Subjected to radiocarbon dating, the charcoal suggested that humans may have occupied the site 33,000 years ago. The Monte Verde findings remain highly controversial, but if authenticated will require archaeologists to rethink their theories on the migration of early peoples to the Americas.
Further reading: Thomas D. Dillehay, Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile, 2 vols. (Washington,
D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989);-, The
Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Ruth Gruhn and Christy G. Turner II, “On the Settlement of the Americas: South American Evidence for an Expanded Time Frame,” and “Reply,” Current Anthropology 28 (1987): 363-365; David J. Meltzer, “Clocking the First Americans,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 21-45.
—Martha K. Robinson
World History
