Seaweed confirms Monte Verde village in Chile is among oldest in the Americas

[Judi Lynn]

Seaweed confirms Monte Verde village in Chile is among oldest in the Americas
The inland settlement, about 14,000 years old, predates the Southwestern Clovis sites by about a millennium and coincides with findings at Paisley Cave in Oregon, researchers say.

By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 10, 2008

Seaweed found at an inland settlement in Chile confirms that the village is one of the oldest inhabited sites in the Americas and demonstrates that residents had extensive contact with the coastline, 50 miles away, researchers said Friday.

Radiocarbon dating of the seaweed shows that the samples are 14,100 years old, give or take 120 years. That means the site, called Monte Verde, is at least a millennium older than the so-called Clovis sites in the American Southwest, long believed to be the most ancient in the New World.

The report comes just a month after researchers reported similar dates for fossilized human feces, called coprolites, found in Paisley Cave in Oregon.

Together, the reports support the growing idea that the first immigrants to the Americas arrived from Asia over a land bridge across what is now the Bering Strait and made their way down the Pacific Coast as far as South America, exploiting abundant marine resources as they traveled.

Monte Verde -- now in a peat bog, about 500 miles south of Santiago and 10 miles from the coast -- contained about a dozen huts on a minor creek, 10 miles north of a large bay. Perhaps 20 to 30 people lived there, said archaeologist Tom D. Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, who has been studying the site for 30 years.

More:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/latinamerica/la-sci-seaweed10-2008may10,0,3483790.story