A New Study Says Humans Were in America 130,000 Years Ago

In the winter of 1992, a construction crew in San Diego, California started cutting into the rocks that flanked the State 54 Highway, in a bid to widen the road. Those rocks hailed from the Pleistocene period and were rich in Ice Age fossils, so scientists from the San Diego Museum of Natural History accompanied the crew to recover whatever they unearthed. Among bits of horse, camel, dire wolf, and ground sloth, they found the remains of a single mastodon—an extinct mammoth-like animal. “And we noticed there was something different about it,” says Thomas Deméré, who was part of the team.

Based on several lines of evidence—the way the bones are broken, the way they lay, the presence of large stones that show curious patterns of wear and are out-of-place in the surrounding sediment—the team think that early humans used rocks to hammer their way into the mastodon’s bones. That wouldn’t have been contentious in itself, but the team also claims that the bones from the “Cerruti Mastodon” are 130,000 years old..