Video argues pre-Clovis sites support Leakey’s early-human timeline

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Key facts

• Tom Dillehay began excavating Monte Verde in 1977. Finds from subsequent campaigns included waterlogged wooden structures, stone tools and butchered megafauna dating to about 14,500 cal BP. The site helped overturn Clovis-first, but not literally overnight.
• White Sands footprints in New Mexico are about 21,000–23,000 years old, and their chronology has received independent radiocarbon support.
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign archaeologist Lauryn Boron applied six cut-mark criteria to roughly 36,000 Bluefish Caves bone fragments and reported 18 marked mammoth bones. The human-butchery interpretation remains disputed.
• The California locality is the Cerutti Mastodon Site, not “Seruti.” Its 2020 Nature paper interpreted fractured mastodon bones and cobbles as tools used around 130,000 years ago, but the interpretation remains contested.
• Wayalaco has been assigned an age of roughly 1.2 million years through stratigraphic and regional volcanic arguments rather than direct dating of the artifacts; its date and classification remain disputed.
• The correct name is Xalnene Tuff. Proposed ages for Mexico’s footprint trackways range from about 40,000–120,000 years to roughly 1.2–1.3 million years, depending on the method; the human attribution and older date remain debated.
• Monte Verde remains dated to about 14,500 cal BP. The post’s claimed 2026 study redating it much later is not supported by the cited record.
• Calling the finds a vindication of Leakey’s timeline is the video’s interpretation, not an established archaeological conclusion.

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