Dillehay et al Rebuttal to Surovell et al. 2026 article in Science on Monte Verde, Chile

Surovell et al. present three primary arguments challenging the age and cultural integrity of the Monte Verde II (MV-II) site in Chile, which is dated to approximately 14.5 ka: (i) the presence of an ~11.0 ka Lepué Tephra stratigraphically beneath the MV-II component, implying a mid-Holocene age; (ii) the existence of an erosional unconformity indicating a temporal hiatus; and (iii) the hypothesis that archaeological wood and associated materials in the site were redeposited by fluvial processes. Each of these claims is evaluated below in terms of multiple interdisciplinary data and found to be unsupported. Their study contains numerous significant errors, misinterpretations, and methodological and interpretive flaws. We uphold the original interpretation of MV-II as a late Pleistocene human occupation.

Since the mid-1970s a large interdisciplinary team led by Dillehay (1989, 1997) spent more than a decade meticulously documenting the archaeology and paleoecology of the Chinchihuapi Creek area and the Monte Verde Site Complex (MV-I, MV-II, CH-1, CH-II), particularly identifying artifacts, features, the remains of extinct Pleistocene fauna, and a variety of floral remains at MV-II, all dated to ~14,500 years. After limited hours during four days of fieldwork with no excavation in and direct observation of the site itself, in contrast, Surovell’s small team proposed that the site was stratigraphically above an ~11.0 ka tephra, thus dated to the mid-Holocene, and contaminated by wood and other materials fluvially redeposited from older contexts nearby or upstream. All these claims are categorically false, as we demonstrate here.