An early Indigenous site may not be early, but it doesn't really matter

Stop trying to make “Clovis First” happen; it’s not going to happen. A landmark site in the peopling of the Americas is several thousand years younger than we thought. While that means very different things about the site itself, it doesn’t change the big picture as much as the researchers who generated the new date are claiming. University of Wyoming archaeologist Todd Surovell and his colleagues recently took a second look at the age of a site called Monte Verde in southern Chile, and it turns out that people lived there 8,000 years ago—not 14,500, as the archaeologists who first described it claimed. Monte Verde is about as far from the Bering Land Bridge as you can get without leaving the continents, so its age was the first piece of evidence that people were well-established in the Americas before the end of the last Ice Age. But it hasn’t been the last, so Surovell and his colleagues’ findings don’t actually change what we now know about the peopling of the Americas—and they definitely don’t put the “Clovis First” hypothesis back on the table. In 1997, a team of archaeologists sent shockwaves through the field by publishing radiocarbon dates for an ancient campsite in souther

Mar 20, 2026 → Mar 20, 2026