New findings from archaeologists in Mexico suggest that humans lived in the Americas much earlier than previously suspected.
Researchers digging in the Chiquihuite Cave, a high-altitude cave in Mexico, found evidence of stone tools that suggest people inhabited the site more than 33,000 years ago.
“This is a unique site. We’ve never seen anything like it before,” professor Tom Higham, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, told BBC News this week. “The stone-tool evidence is very, very compelling. Anyone can see that these are deliberately manufactured stone tools, and there are lots of them. The dating, which is my job, is robust. And so it’s a very exciting site to have been involved in.”
The new findings question the long-held belief that the earliest humans in the Americas were the Clovis people, who used a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska during the last ice age. The Clovis theory became widely accepted among those in the scientific community, and many researchers rejected any claims that people may have lived in the Americas before the migration of big-game hunters from what is now present-day Russia.
But by the 1980s, scientists and researchers began to look again at the Clovis theory after evidence was found suggesting that a 14,500-year-old human presence existed in Monte Verde, Chile. The team of researchers used charcoal, sediment, and bone data to gauge the age of recovered materials, and the work was completed through a partnership between the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico.
Higham said the unique findings correlate to similar data uncovered in Brazil and said the discovery could rewrite the understanding of the history of the Americas.
“In Brazil, there are several sites where you have stone tools that look robust to me and are dated 26-30,000, similar dates to the Chiquihuite site,” Higham said. “This could be an important discovery that could stimulate new work to find other sites in the Americas that date to this period.”
