UW archaeologist shakes scientific world with new evidence of human arrival

A University of Wyoming archaeologist is the lead author on a new paper that has potentially upended what we know about the history of humanity in the Americas. Todd Surovell led an international team to Monte Verde in southern Chile, one of the most revolutionary archaeological sites in the world. The evidence they collected pushed back the arrival of humans in the Americas by thousands of years.

Surovell studied the same evidence and reached a much younger, more controversial age. He and his team dated Monte Verde to 8,200 years at the oldest, rather than the 14,500 years that has been “an unquestionable scientific fact” for most archaeologists. “This site is now 5,000 years younger than the first Clovis settlements, instead of 1,500 years older,” Surovell said. “Monte Verde was supposed to be paradigm-changing. In our interpretation, they got it wrong.”

The findings at Monte Verde, published in 1997, effectively disproved the “Clovis First” model that humans arrived in the Americas around 13,000 years ago. Surovell has been skeptical of Monte Verde for years, noting that it is at least 500 years older than any known archaeological sites in Alaska. “How do you get people to southern Chile over 14,000 years ago, while leaving basically an invisible record further north?” he asked.

Surovell’s team dated volcanic ash layers and sediment, determining that the archaeological site was buried between 3,000 and 8,000 years ago. He believes the older radiocarbon dates came from “old wood” that was redeposited from much older layers. “If you’re trying to date when people were at Monte Verde, but you’re dating redeposited wood from the Ice Age, you’re going to have a serious dating error of at least 6,000 years,” he said. The original investigators have disagreed with the findings, but Surovell encourages independent replication. “If anybody wants to replicate what we’ve done, I 100% encourage it,” he said.