Monte Verde, long treated as one of the earliest human camps in South America, is suddenly at the center of a sharp scientific split over the timeline. A new study in Science argues that the famed Chilean site isn't a 14,500-year-old camp from the ice age at all, but a much younger Middle Holocene settlement dating to roughly 4,200 to 8,200 years ago. Lead author Todd Surovell's team reanalyzed the site's geology, zeroing in on a layer of volcanic ash from an eruption about 11,000 years ago and concluding that key artifacts sit above that layer, not below it—meaning the human occupation there wasn't ice age-old, per Live Science.
Critics say the authors are reading the ground wrong. Vanderbilt archaeologist Tom Dillehay, who has studied the site for a half-century, flatly rejects the presence of that ash under the site and says the new work draws conclusions from distant outcrops, not the actual excavation area, which is now destroyed. Other specialists are calling the paper's geological claims "egregiously poor" and arguing that basic tests were skipped. Detractors also say that the research doesn't account for the fact that artifacts dating back 14,500 years, like a mastodon's tusk made into a tool, have been found at the site, per the AP. Dillehay's team is preparing a formal rebuttal, notes Live Science. Surovell, meanwhile, says he welcomes attempts to replicate his findings.
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