Here's everything you need to know about the discovery and the reactions of other archaeology experts. “The date of the find at 130,000 years ago is a really big ask for archaeologists who are used to talking about 12, 13, 14,000 years ago.
“The earliest occupation of the Americas is a highly contentious subject,” says University of Southampton archaeologist John McNabb. However, many of the world’s leading experts in American archaeology already have expressed some form of skepticism to the paper’s claims. But as Deméré and their colleagues tell it, their evidence-a mastodon skeleton, bone flakes, and several large stones-shows that the area was a “bone quarry,” where an unknown hominin allegedly smashed fresh mastodon bones with stone hammers, perhaps to extract marrow or to mine the skeleton for raw materials. To be clear, the team has not found human bones at the site. “Of course, extraordinary claims like this require extraordinary evidence, and we feel like the Cerutti mastodon site presents this evidence.” “I realize that 130,000 years is a really old date and makes our site the oldest archaeological site in the Americas,” says study leader Tom Deméré, the paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, whose team describes their analysis today in Nature. If the researchers are right, the so-called Cerutti mastodon site could force a rewrite of the story of humankind. In an announcement sure to spark a firestorm of controversy, researchers say they’ve found signs of ancient humans in California between 120,000 and 140,000 years ago-more than a hundred thousand years before humans were thought to exist anywhere in the Americas.