Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2215
SUBJECT: ARCHAEOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
Tom Dillehay who found Monte Verde, who excavated Monte Verde in South America, and realized that it was plus 14,000 years old, and therefore a lot older than what was then accepted as the model for the first peoples in North America.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Archaeologist Tom Dillehay led excavations at Monte Verde in southern Chile, and his peer-reviewed work dates human occupation there to at least roughly 14,500 calibrated years before present, with a lead author paper reporting ephemeral human activity between about 18,500 and 14,500 cal BP. That is older than the Clovis-first model, which held that people first entered the Americas around 13,000 years ago, and the Monte Verde findings are widely credited with overturning that model. Dillehay's own publications state that the old Clovis-first model of entry around 13,000 years ago no longer explains the peopling of the New World. A 2025 study by Surovell and colleagues has recently disputed the site's antiquity, but Dillehay and much of the field continue to accept the pre-Clovis dating, so Hancock's characterization of the discovery is accurate.