January 12, 2015

The Oldest Human Skeleton Ever Unearthed in South America

An 11,230-12,401 year old adult male skeleton has been unearthed at Los Vilos in Chile. This is probably the oldest human skeleton ever unearthed in South America. This individual’s diet consisted of seafood, mainly fish and sea lions. He had serious gum infections and small wounds, and died at the relatively early age of 45. He suffered a common ear infection of seafarers. The place where he was found adds to the proof that the earliest Americans came by way of the sea. The archaeologists at the site have collected thousands of human bones. Bones of five other individuals within walking distance of each other have been found. The 11,230-12,401 year old skeleton was found in a mound, buried in a fetal position. And surprisingly, the five other individuals were buried in a different millennium, a thousand years later, in the same place. Donald Jackson, the lead archaeologist, submitted the bones for radio-carbon dating to three different labs in the US. He decided to publish the most conservative date of the three labs at 11,230 years.
(My Note; A little further down the Chilean coast, at Monte Verde, is the site of the first definite Pre-Clovis settlement. Much further north, at Paisley Cave, in Oregon, is the second positively dated Pre-Clovis site. By that, I mean human made tools dated at Pre-Clovis times, fibers, housing posts, human footprints, fishing implements, human coprolites, seaweed chewed on by humans, all dated at Pre-Clovis time periods, peer tested stratigraphy dating. Add to that the very old human remains found on the Channel Islands off the coast of California, and the evidence for a Pre-Clovis entry into the New World along the Pacific Coast by way of canoe traffic is now proven. The only way for humans to have reached coastal Oregon and coastal Chile in Pre-Clovis times was by way of canoe from Asia, hugging the coast from Siberia to the American Pacific Coast).
Que Pasa has the story (in Spanish) here;
http://www.quepasa.cl/articulo/ciencia/2015/01/3-16012-9-el-primero-de-nosotros.shtml
And Donald Johnson’s research on the site and the ancient individual is posted at Academia.edu as a re-print of his post in a peer reviewed journal here;
http://www.academia.edu/2040983/Human_remains_directly_dated_to_the_Pleistocene-Holocene_transition_support_a_maritime_diet_among_the_first_settlers_of_the_Pacific_coast_of_South_America