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Monte Verde Find Rewrites Human Arrival in South America
A new study places human occupation at Monte Verde, Chile during the mid-Holocene, far more recently than the site's famous pre-Clovis layers, challenging assumptions about when and how people fully colonized the southern tip of the Americas.
Key Takeaways
- Monte Verde's MV-I layer is now dated to the mid-Holocene, 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, distinct from the pre-Clovis MV-II deposits
- A sterile layer separating the two occupations indicates thousands of years of abandonment between them
- The finding supports genomic evidence of multiple distinct migration pulses into South America
- Cosmogenic nuclide dating of stone artifacts enabled the chronological resolution where organics were scarce
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