Archaeological site in Chile upends theory of how humans populated the Americas … again

Claudio Latorre said that on the discovery of the Monte Verde site the idea of the population of the Americas going from north to south was ‘chucked out of the window’. Photograph: Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad (IEB), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

A groundbreaking new study may have once again upended our understanding of human prehistory in the Americas.

For years, the predominant theory of how humans arrived in the western hemisphere centred around the Clovis culture, which crossed the Beringia land bridge from Asia between 13,400 and 12,800 years ago, and spread south.