NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE—Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University has worked at Monte Verde in southern Chile since 1977. It had been thought that the Clovis people were the first to arrive in the Americas some 13,000 years ago, but Dillehay’s work at Monte Verde helped scientists to push back that date. Now he has led an international team of archaeologists, geologists, and botanists in an archaeological and geological survey of Monte Verde that found cooking pits with burned and unburned bone and scatters of simple stone tools. “One of the curious things about it is that unlike what we found before, a significant percentage, about 34 percent, were from non-local materials. Most of them probably come from the coast but some of them probably come from the Andes and maybe even the other side of the Andes,” Dillehay said in a press release. Some of the bones came from very large animals that were probably killed and butchered elsewhere between 14,000 and 19,000 years ago. Dillehay thinks people may have traveled through Monte Verde while traveling from the coast to the Andes during the summer months because it may have been more walkable than the surrounding bogs and wetlands, and the site had stone for making tools. To read more about the New World's earliest settlers, go to "America, in the Beginning."
