Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #1284
“San Diego Natural History Museum, and a bunch of other very high-level paleontologists, published in Nature magazine evidence for human presence in North America 130,000 years ago”
What the evidence says
In 2017, a team including researchers affiliated with the San Diego Natural History Museum published a paper in Nature describing the Cerutti Mastodon (CM) site, arguing that fractured mastodon bones and associated stones showing use-wear indicate hominin activity dated to about 130,700 ± 9,400 years ago via uranium-series methods. The paper itself frames this as a claim that would radically revise the timeline of human arrival in the Americas and notes the identity of the hominin species involved is unknown. The finding has not been accepted by the broader archaeological community: Nature's own 2018 follow-up coverage reported that most specialists in early American archaeology dispute the interpretation, citing the absence of stone tools or other artifacts expected at a genuine occupation site, the plausibility of natural or later mechanical bone breakage (including from heavy equipment used during the original 1992-93 highway excavation), and the lack of independent corroborating sites of comparable age elsewhere in the Americas. No retraction has occurred and the paper remains published, but its central claim is widely regarded as unconfirmed and disputed rather than settled science. Describing it as accepted evidence of a 130,000-year human presence therefore overstates the current scientific consensus -- notably, Hancock himself acknowledges elsewhere in this same exchange that the finding is 'very much challenged' and 'not universally accepted.'