Scientists Proved Humans Were in the Americas 27,000 Years Ago

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Scientists Proved Humans Were in the Americas 27,000 Years Ago

Just when archaeologists thought they had found the earliest evidence of humans in the Americas, a rock shelter in central Brazil turned everything upside down again.

Deep inside Santa Elina, a painted rock shelter in Mato Grosso, Brazil, excavators uncovered something no one had ever seen before: three tiny pendants, carefully drilled and polished, made from the armored skin of an extinct giant ground sloth. These weren't accidents of nature. They weren't the work of predators or geological processes. They were jewelry, deliberately crafted personal ornaments, worn on human bodies, in Ice Age South America.

Using cutting-edge technology including synchrotron X-ray microtomography, scanning electron microscopy, and UV photoluminescence imaging, an international team of researchers from Brazil, France, and the United States proved beyond reasonable doubt that these objects were shaped by human hands, on fresh bone, before burial, before fossilization. The chemical fingerprint of the modifications matched the ancient surface of the bone perfectly, ruling out any modern tampering.

Then came the dates. Three independent dating methods, radiocarbon, uranium-thorium, and optically stimulated luminescence, all converged on the same answer. And that answer forces us to completely rethink when, and how, the first people arrived in the Americas.

This is the full story: the site, the animals, the science, and what it all means for human history.

Original Paper: Pansani, Thais R., Briana Pobiner, Pierre Gueriau, Mathieu Thoury, Paul Tafforeau, Emmanuel Baranger, Águeda V. Vialou et al. "Evidence of artefacts made of giant sloth bones in central Brazil around the last glacial maximum." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 290,

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Scientists Proved Humans Were in the Americas 27,000 Years Ago

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