Twenty-five years ago, on Nov. 16, 1992, a massive discovery was made, one that would rewrite the opening chapter in the history of the New World. Richard Cerutti was a construction-site monitor for the San Diego Natural History Museum. That day, he answered the call of a construction team on State Route 54. The project had uncovered a wealth of fossils, including a new species of walrus that was nearly three million years old, and a never-before-discovered armored dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period, which was about 75 million years ago. The archaeologists found very broken mastodon leg bones that were like pier pilings. At the center of the collection were two femur heads, detached from their shafts and nearly touching. The team wonders why they heads were detached and positioned side by side. A large boulder was also next to them. The group kept returning to the possibility that humans had been there, broken the bones, and left. But that would undermine the oldest ideas of how humans came to North America. Archaeologists say the first human visitors to the New World crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Asia about 12,000 years ago. To propose a site more than 100,000 years older was “professional suicide.” The researchers tried to think of alternate theories. They didn’t publish anything. Months went by, then years. Eventually, Cerutti stopped going to the site. He and his wife moved. He began “losing friends from the excavation, one from a suicide that he still cannot shake.” Archaeologists eventually submitted the findings to Nature, and the findings were published in April 2017. It went viral, and dissent from some of the world’s most distinguished archaeologists was immediate. “It was like getting lined up and shot with machine guns,” Cerutti said. To do this day, the site of the mastodon is the great puzzle of Cerutti’s lifetime — and of the New World.
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