Posted on Fri, May. 09, 2008

Chile find points to earlier settlement of Americas

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON --

Remains of meals that included seaweed are helping confirm the date of a settlement in southern Chile that might offer the earliest evidence of humans in the Americas.

Researchers date the seaweed found at Monte Verde to more than 14,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than the well-studied Clovis culture.

And the report comes just a month after other scientists announced they had found coprolites -- fossilized human feces -- dating to about 14,000 years ago in a cave in Oregon.

Taken together, the finds move back evidence of people in the Americas by a millennium or more, with settlements in northern and southern coastal areas.

The prevailing theory has been that people followed herds of migrating animals across an ancient land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, and then moved southward along the West Coast.