Rolling, wooded hills lie 500 miles south of Santiago in Chile, about 30 miles inland from the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Meandering idyllically throughout the landscape is Chinchihuapi Creek. But one particular neck of the woods seems to stand out from the rest. It even has a name: Monte Verde (“green hill”), and is the center of one of the most contentious controversies in archaeology and anthropology.

Excavations from 1977 to 1993 under the direction of Thomas D. Dillehay revealed over 700 seemingly indubitable stone and wooden artifacts and other remains dating from 12.7 to 12 kyr (thousand years) ago. Of these, there are several that are the crux of Dillehay’s contention: a quartzite biface (quartz tool chipped on both sides), a willow-leaf-shaped projectile point, two projectile point midsections, a unifacially chipped basalt pebble, a hammerstone, three stone flakes, a hafted scraper mounted on luma wood, mastodon meat, a tent stake tied with a knotted reed, and three footprints. While many of the other remains may simply be dismissed as “geofacts”, that is, artifact-like remains of natural rather than artificial origin, the aforementioned finds are almost all indisputably artifactual.

Before the discovery of Monte Verde, the oldest unquestioned signs of human habitation in the Americas were excavated near Clovis, New Mexico in the 1930s, and dated to 11.2 kyr ago. While it may seem that the date of entry into the Americas has merely been pushed back a little more than a thousand years, the implications are mind-boggling. According to most of the available evidence, modern humans migrated from Siberia no earlier than 11 to 12 kyr ago. At that time, Siberia was too dry to support the formation of glaciers, thus providing easy access to North America through the 1000-km Bering Land Bridge. The Alaskan sites, such as Walker Road and Dry Creek, all postdate 13 kyr ago. Meanwhile, in North America, the Cordillera Ice Sheet to the west and the Laurentide Sheet to the east sandwiched the narrow and barren ice-free Mackenzie Corridor. Therefore, the perplexing dilemma: how did humans migrate from eastern Siberia down through the corridor and into South America in a few hundred years, leaving no signs of habitation along the way?

       

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