Monte Verde :: essays research papers

After long, often bitter debate, archeologists consider finally come to a consensus that human beings reached southern Chile 12,500 eld ago. The date is more than 1,000 years before the previous benchmark for human habitation in the Americas, 11,200-year-old stone spear points premiere discovered in the 1930s near Clovis, N.M. The Chilean commit, k right offn as monte Verde, is on the sandy banks of a creek in wooded hills near the pacific Ocean. Even former skeptics take away joined in agreeing that its antiquity is now firmly established and that the bone and stone tools and other materials found at that place definitely mark the presence of a hunting-and-gathering people. The new consensus regarding Monte Verde, set forth in interviews last week and formally announced Monday, thus represents the first major shift in more than 60 years in the confirmed chronology of human prehistory in what would much later be called, from the European perspective, the New World. For Ame rican archeologists it is a liberating experience not strange aviations breaking of the sound barrier they have broken the Clovis barrier. Even go back the date by as little as 1,300 years, archeologists said, would have profound implications on theories about when people first reached America, presumably from northeast Asia by way of the Bering Strait, and how they migrated south more than 10,000 miles to occupy the length and width of two continents. It could mean that early people, ancestors of the Indians, first arrived in their new adult male at least 20,000 years before Columbus. Evidence for the pre-Clovis settlement at Monte Verde was amassed and carefully analyzed over the last two decades by a team of American and Chilean archeologists, led by Dr. tomcat D. Dillehay of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Remaining doubts were erased by Dillehays comprehensive research report, which has been circulated among experts and is to be promulgated next month by the Smith sonian Institution. And last month, a group of archeologists, including well-nigh of Monte Verdes staunchest critics, inspected the artifacts and visited the site, coming away thoroughly convinced. In his report of the site visit, Dr. Alex W. Barker, chief curator of the Dallas Museum of Natural History, said "While there were rattling strongly voiced disagreements about different points, it rapidly became clear that everyone was in fundamental agreement about the most important question of all. Monte Verde is real. Its old. And its a whole new ball game.