Archaeologists in San Diego are reporting a find that they say will upend our understanding of human history in the Americas. Some experts, however, are greeting their claims with robust skepticism.
The claims stem from a site in San Diego County, along State Route 54, that was found in the early 1990s to contain the scattered remains of an Ice Age mastodon.
A new analysis of those bones concludes that the mastodon was butchered by humans.
But it adds that the the butchering took place at an astonishing time: 130,000 years ago — well more than a hundred millennia before humans are thought to have arrived in North America.
“This discovery is rewriting our understanding of when humans reached the New World,” said Judy Gradwohl, president and CEO of the San Diego Natural History Museum, in a statement to the press.
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