A later debut for humans.

The small and inconspicuous archaeological site of Monte Verde, Chile—first excavated in the 1970s—captured broad attention with the incredible preservation of materials associated with a Paleoindian encampment (1, 2). Excavations provided a rare glimpse into the life of early humans in the Americas with finds that included wooden lances, mastodon meat and bone, stakes and planks of wooden structures, and various species of chewed plants and seaweed. Yet the discovery timed the presence of humans in the southern tip of South America to 14,500 years ago, a few thousand years earlier than the Clovis Paleoindian sites in North America (3). This raised contentious debate about how humans migrated into the Americas. On page 1283 of this issue, Surovell et al. (4) propose a much younger age of ~8000 to 4000 years old for Monte Verde on the basis of the geomorphic and stratigraphic context of the site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]