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.
in San Diego. I went to see, the exhibits are in the San Diego Natural History Museum and I talked with the expert there, Dr. Tom Demere. And they are convinced that they are looking at human traces there. It was a butchering of a mastodon, but the way the bones were broken and the marrow was extracted, they don't see any other way that this could have been done except by human beings. The thing is, it's 130,000 years old, not 23,000 years old, not 13,000 years old, but 130,000 years old.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Hancock accurately reports the published claim: in 2017, a team led by Steven Holen and San Diego Natural History Museum paleontologist Thomas Demere published a Nature paper arguing that broken mastodon bones and stones (interpreted as hammerstones and anvils) at the Cerutti Mastodon site reflect marrow extraction by hominins about 130,000 years ago, more than 100,000 years before the widely accepted arrival of humans in the Americas. However, the claim is a contested outlier, not established science. Most leading archaeologists reject it, noting the absence of stone tools or debitage, no human remains, fracture patterns (including a shattered tooth with no marrow) consistent with natural or construction-equipment damage, and uranium-series dates that do not by themselves prove human agency. As of 2026 the mainstream consensus still places human arrival in the Americas at roughly 13,000 to 26,000 years ago, so Hancock reports the finding faithfully but understates that it is a widely disputed interpretation rather than a settled discovery.