Ancient habitation in Chile among oldest in the Americas, report says

Seaweed found at an inland settlement in Chile confirms that it is one of the oldest inhabited sites in the Americas and demonstrates that the villagers had extensive contact with a coastline that was 50 miles away, researchers said today.

Radiocarbon dating of the seaweed samples shows that they are 13,980 to 14,220 years old, confirming that the site, called Monte Verde, is at least a millennium older than the so-called Clovis sites in the American Southwest, which were long believed to be the most ancient in the New World.

The report comes just a month after researchers reported similar dates for fossilized human feces, called coprolites, found in Paisley Cave in Oregon.

Together, the reports support the growing idea that the first immigrants to the Americas arrived from Asia over a land bridge across what is now the Bering Strait and made their way down the Pacific Coast as far as South America, exploiting abundant marine resources as they traveled.

Most archaeological evidence of such a migratory path is presumed to have been destroyed because sea levels have risen nearly 200 feet since then. Researchers have thus had to find indirect evidence to support their arguments.

Monte Verde, located in what is now a peat bog about 500 miles south of Santiago and 10 miles from the coast, was a small village of about a dozen huts on a minor creek. About 20 to 30 people probably lived there, said archaeologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, who has been studying the site for 30 years.

But when it was occupied, the village was 50 miles from the coast and 10 miles north of a large bay.

The seaweed samples were found throughout the site, Dillehay and his colleagues reported in the journal Science. Some were found commingled with other plants in cuds that were obviously chewed by residents for their medicinal value. Others were scattered around the huts and most likely were used as food. The plants are good sources of iodine, iron, zinc and other nutrients.

Dillehay had previously identified four species of seaweed in the cuds. In the new study, they identified five more originating on the coast, as well as several others coming from the nearby bay.

Other materials from the coast found at the site included flat beach pebbles, water plants from brackish estuaries and bitumen.

“Finding seaweed wasn’t a surprise, but finding five new species in the abundance that we found them was a surprise,” Dillehay said. “The Monte Verdeans were really like beachcombers. The number and frequency of these items suggests very frequent contact with the coast, as if they had a tradition of exploiting coastal resources.”

The team also found inland materials, including vegetables, nuts, an extinct species of llama and an elephant-like animal called a gompothere. The fact that both types of resources were found indicates that these early peoples were spending enough time at each location to learn about geography and resources.

That suggests, Dillehay concluded, that “the peopling of the Americas may not have been the blitzkrieg movement to the south that people have presumed, but a much slower and more deliberate process.”

 thomas.maugh@latimes.com