1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

The “new archaeological evidence” to which Cann referred was from Monte Verde, a boggy Chilean riverbank excavated by Tom Dillehay of the University of Kentucky; Mario Pino of the University of Chile in Valdivia; and a team of students and specialists. They began work in 1977, finished excavation in 1985, and published their final reports in two massive volumes in 1989 and 1997. In the twenty years between the first shovelsful of dirt and the final errata sheets, the scientists concluded that paleo-Indians had occupied Monte Verde at least 12,800 years ago. Not only that, they turned up suggestive indications of human habitation more than 32,000 years ago. Monte Verde, in southern Chile, is ten thousand miles from the Bering Strait. Archaeologists have tended to believe that paleo-Indians would have needed millennia to walk from the north end of the Americas to the south. If Monte Verde was a minimum of 12,800 years old, Indians must have come to the Americas thousands of years before that.