A meal that rewrites history
In a peat bog near Chinchihuapi Creek, roughly 50 miles from the Pacific coast, archaeologists unearthed the remains of a small settlement. This site, known as Monte Verde II, held a remarkable secret preserved in its oxygen-free environment: seaweed. Direct radiocarbon dating of the seaweed samples placed them between 14,220 and 13,980 years ago. This date is 1,000 years before the Clovis culture, which was long considered the first human culture in the Americas.
The discovery, led by archaeologist Tom Dillehay, showed a pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas. The excellent preservation at Monte Verde was due to the creek's rising waters, which created a bog that sealed the site and protected organic materials from decay. Among the finds were the foundations of a dozen huts, stone tools, and the bones of extinct animals like the gomphothere, a relative of the elephant. But it was the seaweed that linked the site to the coast and a new theory of human migration.
The coastal migration route
The existence of a 14,500-year-old settlement in southern Chile makes the long-held "ice-free corridor" theory of migration improbable. That theory proposed that humans first entered the Americas from Asia around 13,500 years ago, traveling through a corridor between massive continental ice sheets. The dates from Monte Verde show people were in South America long before that corridor was passable.
The seaweed points to an alternative: the Pacific Coastal Migration theory. This model suggests early peoples traveled by boat down the coast from Asia. The Monte Verde find includes nine distinct species of marine algae. These plants had to be transported from the coast and nearby estuaries, a distance of over 50 miles. This shows that the site's inhabitants had a deep knowledge of coastal resources and likely a tradition of exploiting them. Some of the seaweed was found in hearths, suggesting it was cooked for food. Other portions were discovered as chewed "cuds" or quids, mixed with medicinal plants and shaped to fit the human palate, indicating their use in medicine.