[narrator] It's one of the greatest mysteries
Downloaded from YTS.MX
of the human journey.
When did our ancient ancestors first arrive
in the Americas?
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
There should not be people on the continent
before 15,000 years ago.
[narrator] But what if the history books are wrong
by thousands of years
and early humans crossed a forbidding ice sheet
to get here?
Renegade archeologists across the Americas
are making shocking discoveries.
In a cave in Mexico,
evidence of humans living here deep in the Ice Age.
Bone, that changes history.
[narrator] In the Canadian Yukon,
evidence suggests that humans survived the Ice Age
alongside now extinct beasts.
That's something. Everybody.
[narrator] And in the deserts of New Mexico,
ancient footprints baffle experts.
[Kim] Look at what Bonnie found.
Speechless.
[narrator] History will have to be rewritten.
It's just gonna change everything we think
about the people in the Americas.
It's mind blowing.
I am walking where they were walking.
[dramatic music playing]
[narrator] On the plains of Central Mexico,
in mid-February,
the dust-filled air is scorching.
On the parched Earth
beneath the Zuloaga Mountains,
there's nothing but cactus as far as the eye can see.
Ciprian Ardelean,
a Romanian-Mexican archeologist
has been scouring this harsh landscape
for over a decade.
He's on a controversial quest
that could change history.
[Ciprian] I'm in search for the earliest humans
on the American continent.
When I say early,
I am talking about the Ice Age.
That's what I'm searching for.
[narrator] The mystery of when ancient humans
first reached the Americas
has gripped archeologists for centuries.
[Ciprian] When did they get here?
That's the biggest question you can have on a continent.
This is the last holy grail of prehistoric archeology.
People in the Americas truly matters
if we want to understand human origins,
how we emerged, how we evolved,
and how we got everywhere.
From the Arctic to the tropics to Antarctica.
The peopling of the world during the Ice Age,
that was the beginning of this trajectory
that so much defines who we are as a species today.
[narrator] The Ice Age began 2.6 million years ago
and lasted until 12,000 years ago.
But the temperature wasn't constant.
Ice levels rose and fell
across Earth's landscape numerous times.
We are searching for the humans of the LGM,
of the Last Glacial Maximum.
That's when the Ice Age was at its highest.
[narrator] The Last Glacial Maximum
was 20,000 years ago,
an age so inhospitable
that it stopped both humans and beasts
in their tracks.
It's a mysterious era that takes us deep
into pre-history,
tens of thousands of years
before the fall of Rome,
the first Chinese dynasty
and before the pyramids of Egypt.
It is a time of relentless ice and snow
ruled by monstrous beasts.
Ardelean's quest to find people
who survived this frozen world
goes against everything we've been taught.
Most textbooks say humans left Africa
at least 60,000 years ago,
some traveling northeast,
eventually reaching the Bering Land Bridge
that connected what is now Asia
with the Americas.
Here, they hit a roadblock,
an impenetrable wall of ice.
Any ability for animals, even humans,
to migrate through Canada would've slammed shut.
Humans would not have been able
to, um, make that journey.
[narrator] The ice sheet was massive,
stretching from what is now the Yukon
all the way to New York.
It was nearly 10,000 feet high
and would've towered many times
over our tallest skyscrapers,
a six million square mile desert of ice.
No plants, no animals.
Attempting to cross it, the thinking goes,
meant certain death.
[Ciprian] But there were corridors
that were potentially becoming ice free
as early as 15,000 years ago
after the Last Glacial Maximum
that humans could have migrated through.
[narrator] Ardelean doesn't buy it.
He says early humans crossed
over many thousands of years earlier
and traveled all the way to Mexico,
putting them in North America
long before the end of the Ice Age.
How is it possible for them to be here?
[narrator] Ardelean's theory was developed by accident.
He didn't come here looking for traces of early people.
He started out searching for something
far less controversial,
Ice Age plants and animals.
[Ciprian] I thought this would be a good site
to obtain paleo-environmental information,
like, how the climate was, to extract pollen
and other sort of evidence,
try to reconstruct the Ice Age environment.
[narrator] Ardelean asks villagers
if there are any caves in the area.
They point him in the direction
of one of the highest mountains
in Central Mexico.
Locals called it Chiquihuite Cave.
It was at almost 3,000 meters of altitude.
One has to walk, like, nine hours up the hill.
[man] Oh!
Oh, my God.
Very difficult logistics.
I started excavations.
[narrator] He takes samples of the sediments in the cave
and sends them away for radiocarbon dating.
[Ciprian] The most recent layers at the top,
basically under your feet as you walk
were 12,000 years old.
Everything we excavated was Ice Age.
[narrator] A rare sight, ideal for learning
about the Ice Age environment.
As he digs, he makes a surprising discovery.
[Ciprian] Suddenly, started to note small pieces of stone
with modified edges.
So when ancient people make tools out of stone,
they hit the stone
and they obtain these pieces of stone that they can use
as cutting tools or scraping tools.
[narrator] But how is that possible?
No humans are supposed to have arrived
in the Americas yet,
let alone so far south.
I really didn't expect humans there.
You realize that indeed the cave
is actually full of tools.
[narrator] But you can't have tools
without humans to make them.
I still had no idea how old.
[narrator] Stone can't be dated.
So he collects sediment around the tools
and sends it for radiocarbon testing.
He dates each layer from the surface of the cave
to the very bottom of his excavation.
The results are startling.
When I started to receive the first, uh, results,
and it was...
The dates suggest 27,000
plus minus 2,500 years.
So that layer could be as old
as 30,000 years old.
That goes pretty much
against everything that's accepted.
We are in Central Mexico,
not on the coast,
not right next to the Bering Strait.
We are many thousands of kilometers
from any possible entry point to the continent,
whether by land or sea.
And yet for thousands and thousands of years,
you have humans living there.
[narrator] In 2020, he publishes his findings,
making headlines around the world.
[reporter] Ciprian Ardelean
is here on the show with us.
[Ciprian] Good morning, everybody.
[man 1 in French]
[man 2 in English] This is a, uh, a major find
of human prehistory.
[in other language]
[in English] What blew everybody's mind,
if the evidence is, uh, accurate,
it's gonna change everything we think
about the people in the Americas.
[narrator] The discovery is published
in the journal Nature.
Chiquihuite did make a big impact
when it was published in Nature in 2020.
It was huge.
Ciprian Ardelean has been working there
with a multidisciplinary team
using all of the barrage of techniques
that archaeologists have at their disposal these days,
which is really exciting.
[narrator] But the excitement is tinged with skepticism.
The evidence from Chiquihuite gets scrutinized
by the best in the field
and questions are raised.
They called this discovery a misjudgment of data.
[Ted] The problem is whether or not
the artifacts are truly artifacts,
whether or not those are naturally produced
from rocks falling
and crashing into one another,
or could these truly be things
that were the products of humans.
For somebody looking at all this evidence
from far away
and not necessarily being on the site
and working directly with the artifacts,
it's understandable.
But the tools,
they were not accidents.
Ardelean's discovery fails to shift the official date
of human arrival to the Americas.
It remains at 15,000 years ago.
But convinced he's on to something
that could rewrite history,
Ardelean doubles his efforts.
I said, there must be some other cave,
so let's expand the search.
[narrator] To convince the skeptics,
Ardelean needs more proof
like a fire pit or bones.
[Ciprian] As soon as I stood on the edge
of the entrance here,
I said, "This is it."
[narrator] Sixty miles from Chiquihuite Cave
is what locals call Sima de las Golondrinas,
the Chasm of Swallows.
It's a huge hole with a 40-foot vertical drop
into a large cavern.
For Ardelean, it's the perfect way
to travel back in time.
[Ciprian] Every grain of dirt that goes in,
as well as animals, humans, whatever,
never comes out, right?
So it's like a time capsule.
[narrator] The team builds a scaffold into the dark hole
that will be their dig site for the next three months.
And they set up camp on the slopes
of a cactus-lined valley.
[Ciprian] We are far away from civilization here.
There is no phone signal,
strong winds, heavy rains.
It's very difficult to build a camp here.
[narrator] But the terrain isn't their only challenge.
Sitting at the intersection
of major drug trafficking routes,
this region has become a violent battleground
between Mexico's most dangerous cartels.
It has one of the highest murder rates in the world.
So every time Ardelean goes on a supply run,
he's risking his life.
[dogs barking]
[Ciprian] Don't film on the street.
-[producer] No? -[Ciprian] No, on the street, no.
[producer] From inside the truck we can do?
No, no. I mean, don't film the street.
Because there are people there
and who knows what they're doing right now.
[narrator] Archeologist Ciprian Ardelean
is risking everything to find evidence
of the earliest people on the American continent.
Don't film the street.
There are people there
and, uh, who knows what they are doing right now.
[narrator] He's even risking his life.
[Ciprian] You will see a lot of destruction here,
the houses there
and, uh, that's where we stop talking English
in loud voice.
The drug cartels, they are all around us,
and that's why you need a hardcore crew.
So it's better to be hidden in the mountains
than visible near the villages.
It's better to have an isolated camp.
We are about 60 kilometers away from the town.
And, uh, there is no road to get here.
It's just like a path.
[narrator] Once safely out of town,
he returns his focus to the ancient past.
[Ciprian] We are driving right around the edges
of an ancient lake that was active
during the Ice Age.
This region was very different
from what you see behind me.
[narrator] During the Last Glacial Maximum
20,000 years ago,
Central Mexico was lush and green.
Where there is now cactus,
towered majestic pine trees,
the cracked earth was once soaked with water,
forming lakes and marshes
that fed Ice Age plants and animals.
But did humans live among them?
[Ciprian] Only one person at the same time
on the flight of stairs.
Twelve meters of free fall.
[narrator] To change the history books,
Ardelean needs more than bits of stone.
He's looking for butchered animal bones.
[Ciprian] Cut bone beats stone tools
because there is, uh, a stronger argument
towards human presence
when you have a human intervention
on an animal part.
[narrator] When hunters de-flesh
and butcher an animal,
they leave telltale cut marks on bones.
A bone dates itself
because you can take tiny samples of it
and do radiocarbon.
[narrator] Ardelean's team meticulously excavates
each layer of sediment in the cave
and records every bone and stone they find.
[Ciprian] This is a quiet place.
This is a place where you have time
to dream with the world
that you are uncovering.
When you expose a buried walking surface
in a cave,
a surface that you can actually see
the ancient topography
and you can imagine human feet on it,
that's time travel.
You are sitting on the same surface
as the ancient ones.
[narrator] After five weeks of digging,
he hits Ice Age sediment
in a lower cavern of the cave.
A thin layer of charcoal
that he's dated to 16,000 years ago.
It's here, at least three
major extremely thin lenses of charcoal.
It is the very end
of the Last Glacial Maximum.
So the whole story, we are... We are telling here
has to do with this layer.
[narrator] If the history books are right,
there should be no evidence of humans below the charcoal.
But if Ardelean is right,
the cave would've been an ideal place
for people to find shelter from the elements
and clean water to drink,
if they were really here.
Oh, damn. Holy [bleep].
A bone sitting on the next layer.
A big rib.
It's maybe the rib
of a small herbivore.
There's new bone coming out.
Didn't expect this to show up here.
It looks like a leg... A leg bone.
There it goes.
-It's cut. -[woman gasps]
[Ciprian] Cut.
And is V-shaped.
There was a cutting edge that went through.
-Man, it's cut. -[woman chuckles]
[Ciprian] This is an old cut.
[narrator] Ardelean thinks it's the ankle bone
of a big horn sheep.
The faint etchings appear to have been made
by a stone blade.
[Ciprian] Maybe of two blows,
could be a first clue,
the presence of humans
at the very end of the Glacial Maximum
in this cave.
And if they were here in the middle of Mexico,
they were probably roaming around the continent
throughout the entire Glacial Maximum.
That one millimeter cut changes history.
[narrator] If the cut was made by a human,
it means people were here in Mexico
at least 16,000 years ago.
If so, how did they make it
across the vast ice sheets in the north?
We can't know the how until we know the when.
So the when's gotta be known first.
[narrator] Figuring out exactly
when people arrived in the north
across the Bering Land Bridge
might explain how they could have made it
all the way to Mexico.
French archaeologist Lauriane Bourgeon
is also searching for the answer.
She's sifting through tantalizing clues
from the Yukon Territory in Canada
from a decades old excavation site
called Bluefish Caves.
When I started learning
about, uh, the prehistory of the Americas,
I was told that people arrived
to the Yukon 15,000 years ago.
I heard about Bluefish Caves
when I was doing my master in France,
and I was told that there were some stone tools
and some possibly modified bones,
possibly 25,000 years old.
But it was contested.
[narrator] The evidence sat in boxes, ignored,
until Bourgeon decided to take a fresh look.
The archaeologist who unearthed it
in the 1970s
was, like Ardelean, a renegade.
Jacques Cinq-Mars disputed common wisdom,
arguing the stone and bones he found
at Bluefish Caves
had been used by humans deep into the Ice Age.
This is a mammoth, uh, leg bone, a long bone,
which shows as elements
of, uh, reduction by human beings.
And the age is about 23,500 years ago.
[narrator] His 30 years of research
were mired in controversy.
Critics questioned his dating techniques.
Funding eventually dried up and he died in 2021
before completing his work.
But his story intrigued Bourgeon.
I decided to test his entire bone collection.
I thought that Jacques Cinq-Mars
might have been wrong.
Were people there at Bluefish Caves
20,000 or 30,000 years ago,
or is it all incorrect?
[narrator] Bourgeon searches
through 40,000 ancient animal bones,
caribou, woolly mammoths,
and extinct species of bison and horse.
And then, I found cut marks on bones.
One bone in particular,
a horse mandible with cut marks.
There's a series of cuts,
very thin, very deep.
A carnivore wouldn't leave such marks.
[narrator] Archeologist Lauriane Bourgeon
discovers a horse jaw in the archives
with mysterious cuts on it.
[Lauriane] There's a series of cuts,
very thin, very deep.
[narrator] Could they have been made by humans?
[Lauriane] A carnivore wouldn't leave such marks.
Very clear human intervention on this horse mandible.
[narrator] To determine its age,
Bourgeon sends the bone
to one of the world's best radiocarbon labs
at Oxford University in England.
[Lauriane] And that's when I got the date of 24,000 years.
So that's when I completely changed my mind.
I was like, "Okay.
I have cut marks on this bone
and I have clear date for that bone."
So it means that people were there 24,000 years ago
and it means that Jacques was right.
[narrator] Now she is following
in Cinq-Mars' footsteps,
launching a new excavation at Bluefish Caves
to find out when early people were really here.
This is Lauriane at Bluefish Camp.
We copy.
[man] Uh, one minute out.
[narrator] Bourgeon comes armed
with cutting edge technology
that her predecessor didn't have in the 1970s.
She's also brought an elder,
a former chief of the local Vuntut Gwitchin community.
Bruce Charlie worked with Cinq-Mars as a teenager
during the original excavation 40 years ago.
[Lauriane] So we came here,
uh, in the hope to vindicate Jacques Cinq-Mars
and find more evidence.
We are hoping to find bones,
uh, artifact, stone tools,
uh, evidence of a human presence.
-Hello. -Oh, we made it.
[Lauriane] You made it today.
[narrator] Rolfe Mandel is director
of the Odyssey Research Program that funded the dig.
[Rolfe] This site
represents a potential paradigm buster
and could change, uh, our thinking
about when people were in the Americas.
So, Bruce, this is K4
and, uh...
[Bruce] I'm very happy to be here today.
And, uh, I want to go do some digging
and, uh, and, uh, try to, uh,
think about the past when it began.
[narrator] The area around Bluefish Caves
was an Ice Age anomaly.
Most of what is now Canada was under ice,
but the Northern Yukon was an ice-free plane,
thick with shrubs and grasses.
[thunder rumbling]
[narrator] A huge lake filled the valley.
And large mammals came here to drink and feed.
The caves above it would've been an ideal perch
for hunters to spot the game below.
-Number? -Elevation [indistinct]
-Okay, and that was east? -[woman] Yup.
[Lauriane] Perfect.
[narrator] Despite the mosquitoes
and the constant threat of bears,
the team excavates a rock shelter known as K4.
Cinq-Mars described it in his field notebook,
but never had the chance to excavate.
Oh, hopefully from all of... You know,
from all the deposits here, we find something.
[Rolfe] Mmm-hmm.
Yup. So, did it look sort of like this when you were...
-[Bruce] Yes. -...here?
[Bruce] Exactly the same.
-[Rolfe] Mmm-hmm. -[Bruce] Yeah.
The, uh, Vuntut Gwitchin word for Bluefish Caves
is... [speaks in native language]
[in English] Um, our people called it in that sense,
they called it as to what they saw.
The rock, the water coming in
and swirling around and creating that...
The caves or the dens.
The argument of how long we were here. It's...
Is we never had that argument
because we just felt and know that we've been here
for, again, forever.
[Paulette Steeves] Our people say we have been here forever.
They have every right
to tell their story in their way,
whether it's literal or whether it's metaphorical.
I weave together archeological knowledge,
indigenous knowledge,
environmental knowledge to create...
[narrator] And indigenous archeologist and professor,
Paulette Steeves, believes the story
of when and how humans arrived in the Americas
is tainted by a colonial worldview.
[Paulette] What you learn in this class,
um, that people have been in the Western Hemisphere
for much longer than Western archeologists
say, um, you're not going to hear that in many classes.
I'm Cree Metis,
I was born in Whitehorse Yukon.
When I was in elementary school,
I wasn't taught anything.
It was if, you know, indigenous people didn't exist.
When I was in university, I was taught
that we'd maybe been here 12,000 years
and we were Asians from Asia.
Racism is embedded in American archeology.
It has been since day one.
[narrator] Theories about how and when indigenous peoples
got to the Americas have gone through four phases.
When European explorers landed in the New World
and found marvels like the Mayan pyramids
and Incan stone walls,
they immediately came up with origin stories for them.
Early European settlers just assumed
they couldn't have been made by the indigenous inhabitants
of the... of the continent.
That it was something like the lost tribes of Israel
who got really lost and found theirselves
in, um, the Americas
and developed some miraculous pyramids or it was aliens,
but it couldn't possibly have been indigenous inhabitants.
[narrator] Two hundred and fifty years later,
archeologists concede that indigenous peoples
must have built these wonders.
But the timeline was dictated by the Bible.
[Luiseach] There are ideas from the Bible
that the world has created in 4004 BC.
This held something of a stranglehold on the idea
that there is deep time,
that things are much older than that.
[narrator] By the early 20th century,
Darwin's theory of evolution
popularized the idea of prehistory
and enormous ice age mammals called megafauna.
Then at Blackwater Draw, near Clovis, New Mexico,
a spearpoint is found embedded in a mammoth skeleton,
a species that died out at least 10,000 years ago.
These ancient hunters are named the Clovis people,
and they're thought to have migrated
from Asia into the heart of North America
around 13,000 years ago.
Clovis is really nicely packaged, I would say,
to appeal to your European scientists,
because you have this lovely combination
of beautiful stone tools.
These fluted points
combined with evidence for big game hunting.
[narrator] The archeology establishment
declares the Clovis people are the first and only
ancient peoples in the Americas.
What archeologists did when they created the Clovis people
was they created a group as big as a hemisphere.
That doesn't exist anywhere in the world.
[narrator] History books rarely acknowledge
the prehistoric diversity of indigenous peoples.
There are now thousands of different cultural groups
in the Americas,
and there were likely many more before European contact
decimated those populations.
[Paulette] Calling it the Clovis people is really dehumanizing
and it's a way of erasing indigenous cultural diversity,
even in prehistoric times.
[narrator] But the idea took hold that the Clovis people
were here 13,000 years ago
and were the sole inhabitants of the entire hemisphere.
The establishment dismissed growing evidence
of much older sites from the Yukon
through America and into Brazil.
And then, a history-making discovery
is made on a farm in southern Chile in 1977.
[insects chirping]
I did not set out to disprove or prove Clovis.
I was working on my dissertation work
in the mid-'70s in Chile.
During that time, a student told me that a large
cow's tooth had been found on the property of his uncle.
And I said, this is not a cow's tooth,
it's a mastodon tooth.
And I, um, said, "Where is this place?"
[narrator] Archeologist Tom Dillehay is working
during the same period as Jacques Cinq-Mars,
but unlike Bluefish Caves,
Monte Verde is poised to change everything.
He finds a wooden hut, clothing and food
perfectly preserved in a peat bog.
He assumes they're a couple of thousand years old.
[Tom] Geologists came to the site and said,
"You're gonna have a problem with this site."
And I said, "Why?"
He says, "That overlying peat area,
we have radiocarbon dated
in about 40 other sites in south Chile,
and it's dating about 14,000 years ago,
14,500 years ago."
I said, "It can't be.
You can't have human artifacts that old."
[narrator] Convinced geologists are wrong,
Dillehay sends the human artifacts
for radiocarbon dating.
And they came back 14,500 years old.
And I thought, "Oh, no.
Oh, hell.
I don't wanna deal with this."
Because I had seen what other people had gone through.
[narrator] But at the time, Clovis is gospel.
No one has been able to convince the scientific world
that anyone arrived earlier than 13,000 years ago.
Knowing the scholarly world will try to tear him down,
Dillehay fiercely defends his evidence.
We excavated it very cautiously,
and we're going to stick with our data
and stick with our word.
[narrator] But the cost is high.
[Tom] Twenty colleagues signed a letter
and sent it to the president of the university
saying I should be dismissed
for bringing up an archeological site
like Monte Verde
and stating in that letter too,
that I never got a PhD, which is an outright lie.
And I just kept thinking,
"To the hell with these people,
they don't know what they're talking about.
They're just defending their paradigm."
I learned, you attack me
and I'm going to attack you too.
[narrator] Dillehay collects hundreds of radiocarbon dates,
backs up everything with supporting evidence,
and invites his critics to come see for themselves.
It takes 30 years to shift the tide.
Monte Verde broke the paradigm,
broke the barrier, so to speak.
[narrator] Monte Verde is a turning point.
The date of human arrival gets shifted
from 13,000 to 15,000 years ago.
But Ardelean's discoveries in Mexico are double that,
30,000 years ago.
Now, his evidence is under threat.
This time, it's not the cartel,
-but the weather. -[thunder rumbling]
A wind storm is moving in
and it threatens to tear the camp apart.
A story 30,000 years in the making
could be blown away in a single day.
[tense music playing]
[narrator] Prehistoric archeologist, Ciprian Ardelean
is on a quest to rewrite history
to prove humans were in North America
thousands of years before previously thought,
but the evidence he needs is under threat.
[Ciprian] You need to be obsessed to do this.
I mean, how can you do this year after year,
decade after decade,
storm after storm without being obsessed?
[narrator] The sunset brings good news.
The storm passes.
I think we are safe to go back to work.
Let's go.
[narrator] Deep in the ice age layers,
Ardelean finds two more bones
with potential human-made cuts.
And the damage on these borders is not anatomical.
Something damaged this bone.
[narrator] The cut marks could be 17,000
to 20,000 years old,
but did a human make them?
He can't say for sure.
[Ciprian] Need a more detailed microscopy
on a cleaned specimen.
This is not treasure hunting.
This is rewriting the history of human species.
If you rush conclusions and if you celebrate
before all the possible alternatives are consulted,
uh, you are doing a serious harm to science.
[narrator] Looking for answers,
he flies the bones
to an electron microscopy lab in Mexico City.
This microscope can magnify a bone
down to the atomic level.
It should tell them
if the cut marks were made by ancient humans
or the teeth and claws of another predator.
[Ciprian] So if this is really, uh, a human-made cut,
this is a threshold. This is a real threshold.
It would be a really, really big, big thing.
[narrator] They're hoping to see this signature mark
of a spearhead or blade cut,
a crisp straight line
that proves it was human made.
We're starting to see something.
-[woman] Yup. -[Ciprian] Here it comes.
[laughs]
-That's where it entries. -[woman] Yeah.
[Ciprian] I'm almost certain this is the cut.
[man] Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.
Yeah.
This is all we need.
This is the evidence we need.
-[woman laughs] -Okay, so.
[man laughs] Right.
[woman] Congrats.
[Ciprian] Congrats to you.
It's ten years since the discovery of Chiquihuite.
-[woman] Wow. -[man] Is that right?
That opened it all. It's a crucial moment.
It's, um, an emotional moment
that my voice is breaking
because I'm gonna cry.
[woman laughs]
No, I'm seriously gonna cry.
[narrator] But his work is not done yet.
Now we have to date that layer.
So we still don't know at this moment
how old the bones are.
[narrator] If he can radiocarbon date the bones
to 20,000 years or more,
he'll have sealed the deal.
A human was hunting on the plains of Mexico
deep into the Ice Age.
The implications are profound.
If humans inhabited Mexico this early,
they may well have been in the far north even earlier.
[Lauriane] Got something.
Everybody.
What do you think?
Exciting. It's a horse tooth.
-[woman] You got a horse? -Yeah.
[woman] You got a horse?
[laughs]
[Lauriane] Horse tooth is exciting
because it tells us that we are definitely
in a place that's in a deposit,
uh, possibly older than 14,000 years.
[narrator] The tooth could belong
to an extinct species of horse from the Ice Age.
I just want keep, uh...
I don't even want to talk. I want to keep digging.
-[laughs] -[woman] Okay.
What about the, um, piece of bone
sticking out of the wall here?
Very good. That's encouraging.
So hopefully the frequency of those
will start to increase as you go deeper.
[narrator] Soon they find other Ice Age animals.
Finding some bone fragments here and there.
This complete bone here.
[narrator] Like extinct species of caribou.
It's a food bone.
That's a good thing for us,
and we are hoping to find more.
Another one.
[narrator] Could this pile of bones have been left behind
by humans after a hunt?
[woman] Lauriane, do you wanna see it?
[Rolfe] We're encountering, uh, bones of animals
that are no longer, uh, occurring today.
They're extinct,
including, um, uh, extinct forms of caribou.
Uh, there's extinct American horse,
uh, and other animals that would've thrived in a...
In a Ice Age environment.
And so, uh, I think we're probably down
to about close to 20,000 years ago.
So that's caribou size.
Yeah, I could see the, uh, the marrow.
[Rolfe] Mmm-hmm.
[narrator] Moving with animals is a key part
of Vuntut Gwitchin history.
Every year for thousands of years,
they followed the porcupine caribou herd,
famous for migrating farther
than any other land animal on the planet,
traveling over 1500 miles in a season.
They use the caves here.
They use the hills and the mountains behind me.
They use the river and the creek,
and that brought them to navigate
all from the west, following the animals.
[narrator] Vuntut Gwitchin oral history
is rich with stories of tool making,
hunting, walking great distances,
and hunting mammoths.
So there's a lot of reasons
why I know that people have been here a long time.
We know that, um, mammals have been using land areas
to cross between the continents
for millions of years.
They had to have land that was dry, that had food,
and they wandered across it.
[narrator] Before and even during the Ice Age,
animals migrated across continents
as the climate fluctuated.
The ice that covered Canada reached its peak
about 20,000 years ago,
but go farther back in time,
30,000, 40,000, 50,000 years ago.
And it gets warmer and warmer.
So we're told that even though early humans
were very capable
and they walked from Africa to northern Asia,
they just stopped when they got there.
And they never crossed, like, the mammals were coming
and going all this time,
and humans never came over here?
That doesn't make any sense.
[narrator] If herds of animals crossed
into North America before the ice wall formed,
maybe humans did too.
Maybe they followed the food.
The final proof could be here in New Mexico...
in a restricted area of White Sands National Park,
park ranger David Bustos surveys an area
that's been freshly exposed
by high winds and heavy rains.
He notices something unusual,
huge imprints in the sand.
[David] First prints we seen in the park
was after a large, uh, flood of it.
I was walking around and, uh, started looking
and seeing these enormous, uh, mammoth prints.
I was, "Holy cow, it's huge."
About 13 foot strides.
Just, um, really, really large stride.
And there's no other animal anywhere,
no other tracks that are that large,
just an enormous animal.
[narrator] The storm had ripped off surface layers
of sand, uncovering ancient gypsum soil,
densely packed and covered in fossilized footprints.
[David] And then, you know, started seeing,
um, what looked like elongated prints.
Am I crazy?
Is this... Is this real?
It would be really amazing if it was a human,
but, what are the odds?
[narrator] At White Sands National Park,
something extraordinary is showing up in the sand.
Really incredible footprint.
It just doesn't seem possible to have human prints
alongside with the...
with the mammoth prints.
[narrator] Mammoths were one of many giant animals
known as megafauna that all went extinct here
10,000 years ago.
We know humans used to hunt them,
but how far back does their interaction go?
I didn't know anything about it.
I wondered how common is that to see that,
or is that even...
Should we be seeing that here?
[narrator] Uncertain of what he's discovered,
Bustos reaches out to one of the world's
leading experts in footprints.
I'm ready.
Off we go then.
Yeah.
[narrator] Matthew Bennett has studied
fossilized footprints all over the world.
The images he sent me at that time
were quite intriguing.
I wasn't convinced,
but I was certainly very interested.
[narrator] Bustos found the footprints in an area
where the general public is not allowed.
The only way to access the site is by ATV.
White Sands was once the bottom
of an ice age lake.
Thousands of years after it disappeared,
wind formed the dunes.
[birds chirping]
[narrator] The clay-like mud underneath preserved
the prints of animals that came here to drink
and feed on the plants that grew
along the shoreline.
Maybe humans were here too.
I can see that one.
[narrator] Now, the lake bed is exposed,
offering its secrets.
And it carries on there, doesn't it?
Yeah.
What about...
What about down there?
Those are toes.
And the heel is there.
So amazing. Look at that.
This beautiful sort of sole print
of this human was sitting there.
And at that point I thought,
-"Well, there were expletives, shall we say? -[David laughs]
[Matthew] In the corner here,
under the shadow, you can see toes.
There's a human print. Holy cow.
And you know that was it.
That's another one, you see, the heel's just in here.
I don't get excited about a lot of things.
It's not really in my nature.
I'm sort of British after all.
But there was excitement.
Gorgeous little track.
[narrator] The footprints generate headlines
all over the world,
but leave the archeological establishment
scratching their heads.
We have no experience, no realm of experience
whatsoever to measure, study,
let alone interpret
the significance of these footprints.
[narrator] To uncover the full story
of these remarkable human prints,
Bennett and Bustos invite a team of experts
to have a look.
One of them is indigenous archeologist Ed Jolie.
[Ed] Just the number out here.
It's astounding.
You... Once you realize what you're looking at,
it's hard not to step on one.
It's very much a visceral experience being there
at White Sands and literally, you know, walking,
you know, potentially in the footsteps
of my ancestors.
You know, these were people that walked and talked,
got mad and sad and angry just like us.
It's a pretty powerful experience.
[narrator] But how old are these footprints?
Kathleen Springer and Jeff Pigati
are here to confirm the age.
Their findings could reshape our understanding
of human history, but it won't be easy.
So we were asked to come and sort of do
what we do everywhere and help the team
understand the timing of all of it.
When were the people and the animals
hanging out together?
There's a number of sites all...
Sites all throughout the Southwest that have documented
interaction between human and the megafauna.
But they're typically in the, you know,
13,000-year-old range in that...
In that kind of ballpark.
So, you know, before we got any numbers or anything,
-that's kind of the default-- -The frame of reference.
Exactly. The frame of reference is that,
yeah, these are... These are probably...
You know, probably something very similar.
The question is how do you date a footprint?
You can't date the footprints themselves.
It's at the surface.
And so to be able to date something,
you have to be able to constrain it in time
below and above.
And so if the footprints are always at the surface,
we can't do that.
[narrator] Pigati and Springer decide
to dig underneath the prints
to excavate material that could be dated.
We gotta make an exposure.
We have to... We have to dig a trench.
Yeah.
[narrator] They're looking for animal or plant remains.
Anything containing carbon.
[Kathleen] And we are painstakingly, bit by bit,
50 centimeter chunks at a time,
describing the walls of the sediment.
[narrator] As they scrape at the trench walls,
each layer marks a different period of history.
Every four-inch layer
represents roughly 100 years in time.
In many of the layers,
they notice tiny black dots
the size of pinheads.
We were able to find seed layers,
layers of seeds that were positioned
above and below, uh, various track ways.
And there were prints down all over the place, right?
And so...
And there were prints at the surface, so it...
We basically said, you know, this, this,
this could cover a fair bit of time.
And they... These ones are oxidized.
There's oxygen in, but these are the seeds.
Then right here you see seeds...
and they just layers upon layers of...
And in some places, actually,
we were able to find seeds in the footprints themselves.
So these people were walking around on a landscape,
um, you know, stepping on these plants,
which were alive at the time.
[Kathleen] They were walking on a margin of a lake.
So it was wet and dry in places and these plants
that need water for their lifecycle,
were growing in the wet parts of this environment.
[Jeff] And we used radiocarbon dating
of those seeds to constrain them in time.
So since that time when the people stepped
on the plants,
-the plants haven't moved, the footprints... -[Kathleen] Mmm-hmm.
...haven't moved, and so they're...
-They're directly associated in time. -[Kathleen] Right.
There's a lot of layers here.
So we're really documenting all of them.
And then of course, putting it all together in time
to sort of tell the story of all of these layers.
[narrator] The deeper they dig, the more they find.
-[Jeff] There's footprints everywhere. -[Kathleen] Oh, I know that.
[Jeff] Let me... Let me show you.
[Kathleen] Well, there's a mammoth here.
[Jeff] Oh, yeah, there's a mammoth right here.
Wow. Oh, my God.
[Jeff] There, one. And there's a whole bunch
of humans all through.
They're in the subsurface. We're, like, "Yes."
[narrator] Animal prints mingle with human ones.
Each layer takes them further back in time,
and many contain the organic matter needed to date them.
[David] It's not just one time frame,
one, you know, stamp in time.
There's multiple layers over and over and over again
where you have the megafauna and the human prints.
So there's some places where we have mammoth prints,
a meter above, uh, human prints down below,
and there's also mammoth prints down below.
You can tell there's been a long history of people
through the stratigraphy, walking along
with the megafauna for thousands of years.
[narrator] After a week of digging,
they're three feet down
and still no end to the prints.
The possibilities are staggering.
[Matthew] It's the sheer volume of tracks there.
Thousands, tens of thousands of tracks.
We can actually go back in time
as if we were, you know,
trackers and track the animals and the humans
through the landscape over large areas.
And that gives us, uh, an insight into the way
these different animals are interacting
with one another.
[narrator] The team will have to wait for weeks
before they get dates back for the tiny seeds.
But now there's evidence of another giant beast
who left its mark in the sand.
These massive beasts, you know, that roamed through here.
[growling]
[narrator] After finding thousands
of human footprints...
Hey, look at that.
...scientists discover the tracks
of another giant ice age beast.
These massive beasts, you know,
that roamed through here.
[growling]
[David] A lot of animal prints in nature
are round prints, especially the predators.
Um, you know, a bison is sort of a,
a round print and a camel, you know, a round print.
But humans, they have an elongated print
and also giant ground sloth.
They also have an elongated print.
The sloth prints are absolutely fantastic.
[narrator] This was one of the most
bizarre-looking megafauna of the Ice Age.
The ground sloth stood ten feet high
and weighed 2,200 pounds.
They spent their lives eating plants
and lumbering through grasslands
searching for water.
They were strong, but slow
and could have been easy targets
for Ice Age hunters.
[David] When you start looking at the prints,
it does come to life.
You know, every slight little movement and it becomes real.
And you see a story in the footprints.
[Matthew] Reading a detective story,
we can see how somebody
stepped in the tracks of the sloth print
one after the other,
harassing or stalking this sloth,
making it angry so that it would turn around
and flail with its arms.
And you can see all those flail motions
and it can read all of that story.
To think about and contemplate interactions
between humans and sloths,
uh, and all these extinct fauna.
Uh, it's, like, something out of a movie.
[narrator] It's a rare glimpse back in time
when humans lived side by side with giants.
But what was their world really like?
And how could it help us understand how
and when humans moved across two continents?
The answer could lie over 4,500 miles away
in South America, where a groundbreaking
investigation is underway in Brazil.
Thais Pansani is a Brazilian paleontologist
whose research focuses on the giant sloth
and its relationship to ancient humans.
So I love the whole megafauna,
but I'm particularly in love with the giant sloth.
The interaction of humans with the megafauna
is something that makes me really interest.
[narrator] Giant sloth evolved in South America
30 million years ago,
but there is little information
about when they first encountered people.
Pansani is doing a deep examination
into sloth bones that might hold clues to this mystery.
They were unearthed from an archeological site
in central Brazil in the 1980s.
There are 8,000 sloth bones in the collection,
most of which are called osteoderms.
These small bones were embedded in the skin
beneath the sloth's fur.
For a slow moving beast,
this armor may have been their best defense
against predators.
In a box marked 27,000 years old,
Pansani finds several bones that stand out.
[Thais] I have three giant sloth osteoderms
that are perforated and polished.
So it is something that makes possible
the hypothesis of, "Okay. Someone did that.
It's not natural."
[narrator] Could these tiny bones
have been reshaped by ancient humans
making ornaments or jewelry?
Nobody did a deep investigation
on these ornaments yet.
So I started two main questions.
If these ornaments were made by humans,
and two, provide evidences that these modifications
were made in fresh bones, in fresh carcass.
[narrator] If she's right, it will place people
in the heart of Brazil 27,000 years ago
at the same time Ardelean claims humans
are in Mexico and could be further proof
that humans made it past the ice
long before we ever thought.
The name of the site where they were found
is Santa Elina in Brazil.
It was discovered by husband and wife team,
Denis and Agueda Vialou in 1984.
Agueda is a Brazilian archeologist
who's an expert in prehistoric stone tools.
[in French]
[narrator in English] Denis Vialou is a well-known
French specialist in prehistoric art.
[in French]
[narrator in English] Santa Elina stands in the shadow
of a massive cliff wall covered with breathtaking
ancient artwork,
depictions of humans, animals,
and mysterious geometric symbols.
[Denis in French]
[narrator in English] Extensive excavation spanned 20 years.
Evidence of human occupation
is found at every layer in time.
Clothing, tools,
and ritualistic garb.
The Vialous claim the site
spans from 2,000 years,
all the way back to 27,000 years ago.
[in French]
[narrator in English] This would mean an unprecedented 25,000 years
of human occupation in the center of South America.
The region is Mato Grosso,
a rare oasis,
almost unaffected by the Ice Age.
It was a microclimate that remained habitable,
unlike the icy landscape surrounding it.
Santa Elina could have been a safe haven
for people and animals.
At several time periods,
the Vialous find evidence
of humans living with giant sloth.
[in French]
[narrator in English] In 2011,
the Vialous published their astonishing results,
a site in the Americas claiming to have people
living in the same location for 25,000 years.
But like Bluefish Caves and Chiquihuite,
questions are raised about the validity of the dates.
There is the issue that a lot of these are cave sites,
so they do suffer from preservation,
sediments blowing in, things coming into the caves,
things going out. The difficulty of dating stone tools,
a lack of, you know, organic, um,
material culture that could be more easily dated.
[Ted] It's gonna take our South American colleagues
in Brazil,
convincing us firsthand,
not just through their publications,
that this is evidence that we need
to be paying attention to.
[narrator] Twenty years later,
Pansani brings Santa Elina
back into the spotlight.
She spent the last four years
analyzing the tiny osteoderms
with electron microscopes
and performing experiments.
There's a lot, a lot of evidences
that this was... made by humans.
[narrator] If she can prove these bones
were modified while fresh,
shortly after the beast died,
it directly places humans
on the site 27,000 years ago.
At the same time, humans could be
in central Mexico
and in the north.
If people are settled in every corner
of both continents this early,
how much earlier would they have had to arrive?
See? It can be done.
[narrator] In Sao Paulo, Brazil,
an experiment is underway
that could determine if ancient humans
were making ornaments from giant sloth bone.
Thais Pansani uses original stone tools
from Santa Elina to carve holes
in an armadillo bone,
the only modern mammal
with an osteoderm shell.
See? It can be done.
[narrator] Armed with her final results,
she presents her findings to Agueda Vialou,
one of Santa Elina's original researchers.
[in French]
[in English] They scanning electron microscope.
We have photo luminescence that shows
all of these modifications were made in fresh bones
by humans during contemporaneous interaction
with the giant sloth around 27,000 years ago.
[in French]
-[in English, chuckles] Bravo, bravo. -[chuckles]
And now finally, she has these results,
just one more piece that shows
the significance of Santa Elina.
[narrator] The Santa Elina site in central Brazil
is further evidence the date of human arrival
could have been thousands of years
before the ice barrier was formed.
[in French]
[Thais in English] I'm trying to do a really good work,
but at the same time,
I am just waiting
to hear the critics
because I know that some people will not believe.
And this is bad actually, because in science,
we don't need to believe in things, we need to discover.
[narrator] A constellation of sites is now threatening
to rewrite the history books.
From the south in Chile to the heart of Brazil,
and from the center of Mexico
all the way north to the Yukon.
But the official story won't change
until the scientific community
is convinced beyond a doubt.
[Ted] Changing a paradigm in science
is a monumental effort, for sure.
And in archeology, it definitely means
that the lines of evidence all have to converge,
to come together, to present
a very cohesive story
about the age and the significance
of an archeological site.
And that's a very difficult thing to do.
[narrator] For now, the prevailing theory says
humans entered North America
no more than 15,000 years ago.
The email Ciprian Ardelean
is about to open could change that.
Radiocarbon dates for his human
cut bones have just landed.
Will they finally prove humans made the marks
as far back as 20,000 years ago?
Oh, no.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
This is not good.
No. This is not good.
They didn't work.
The samples didn't work.
They couldn't date them.
I thought that should date
to the glacial maximum,
something like 22,000, 23,000 years old.
So that was at stake with these dates.
[narrator] The bones have been exposed
to thousands of years of water,
leaching out the collagen needed to date them.
I cannot prove it.
I cannot publish this.
[narrator] And then, at White Sands, New Mexico,
an extraordinary turn of events is unfolding.
The date of the organic material is in,
and this time, there is a clear date.
The oldest known human footprints
in North America have been discovered in New Mexico.
Scientists identified approximately 60 fossilized footprints.
Recent study detailing what archaeologists believe
are the oldest known footprints in the United States
is sparking new questions
and upending long-held assumptions.
The ages were between 23,000
and 21,000 years ago, right?
These are... It's really old. Really old.
The jaws dropped, right? That's the...
It was... It was stunning.
-It's... [laughs] -Well, it's 8,000
-to 10,000 years older than Clovis. -Yeah.
[Jeff] It's maybe 5,000 to 7,000 years
-older than most pre-Clovis sites. -[Kathleen] Yeah.
[Matthew] And people were here
before the Last Glacial Maximum.
That's the key thing because
it's that ice sheet barrier
and saying, "Well, they were here
before that ice sheet barrier."
So it fundamentally changes the way
that we look at the peopling of the Americas.
It changes it entirely.
It's a completely new paradigm.
[Luiseach] You cannot deny there are human footprints.
Really, this looks like humans
in New Mexico around the time at the Last Glacial Maximum.
And people need to grapple with this now.
[narrator] The radiocarbon dates of the ancient seeds
at White Sands are unequivocal.
Hundreds of samples and direct contact with the footprints,
proof of humans deep in the continent
over 20,000 years ago.
I never anticipated
or prepared myself for it.
And I still feel that I'm not really prepared for it.
It's just mind-blowing
that they're at least twice the age
that I ever figured they would turn out to be.
We're all gonna be going back to the drawing board,
trying to understand
how these footprints could exist there
at such an early time.
So there's the potentiality that humans
migrated through one of these corridors
before the Last Glacial Maximum.
[Paulette] I think what the White Sands site does
for American archaeology is it wakes archaeologists up.
I think we're at a turning point,
you know, and I think we're really going to see
a lot of change in the next ten years.
You wanna sit in the front, Bon?
I can sit in the front.
[Ed] Native peoples have been saying
for what feels like forever that they have been here
since time immemorial, that we have this deep
venerable connection to the landscape
that many people can't claim.
White Sands validates everything
that native peoples have known for a long time
and been telling everybody,
but no one's really paid attention or listened.
And so it... Deep down, it feels great
to be able to say, "See, we told you so."
[narrator] Bonnie Leno and Kim Charlie are elders
whose ancestors have hunted in New Mexico
for thousands of years.
Their oral histories can shed light
on who these ancient people were.
We are from a Pueblo tribe
and we are from the Pueblo of Acoma.
[Kim Charlie] David Bustos got ahold of me and told us
that they had found some trackways,
trackways of mammoths, humans.
-There you go. -Okay.
-Good to go. -There you go.
Native Americans believe,
when you go somewhere where you found,
you know, evidence of people
living in the past,
you always ask permission.
When you go to a place like this,
you have to really fully go there
with an open heart.
[Kim] Right.
[Bonnie] And that's how you're able to connect
with whose ever is still there.
We know that they're still there.
[narrator] Soon after the elders arrive,
the excavation team makes another discovery
working in the bottom of the trench.
They expose a layer
that hasn't been dated yet,
but what they see here is unprecedented.
[Matthew] Just come down and have a look at it.
I mean, I'll help you down so you can see close in.
Wow. [gasps]
Right here. There's no words to describe
when you see things like this.
[narrator] In White Sands National Park,
ancient footprints have rewritten
the story of human migration to the Americas.
It changes it entirely.
It's a completely new paradigm.
[narrator] And the team uncovers something else.
Just come down and have a look at it
'cause there's amazing
-child prints here where-- -[Kim] Really?
-[Bonnie] Yeah. -One or two-year-olds, probably.
A small set of footprints that were once
inhabited long time ago
and embedded into the soil...
-[Bonnie] Mmm-hmm. -...which turned into rock.
No words to describe
when you see things like this,
it's breathtaking. It's...
You only think about your own children,
the tiny toes that you would see.
It makes you wanna cry.
That is so nice to...
-And to touch it. -I mean, there was people here.
-[Kim] There was life that day. -Life here.
[Matthew] Evidence of at least two children.
Probably the youngest one may be only a one
or so in age based on its size.
And it... It's got all of these superimposed prints.
You can create the scene yourself
that it's a parent out there placing the child down.
It's making the first few tentative,
wobbly steps to become a toddler.
It's very, very emotional.
[in native language]
[Kim] I found another print, Patrick.
[Kim] Matthew.
-[Bonnie] Look what I found right there. -[Matthew] Oh, my goodness.
-Look at that. -[Bonnie] I took all
that dirt off and I said,
"Oh, there's something coming up over here."
All these prints all over.
[narrator] The evidence suggests hundreds
of generations of ancient humans
made the journey here.
Where did they come from and where were they going?
The elders tell a story that could provide answers.
We have heard our migration stories
passed down from generation to generation to generation.
Thousands and thousands
of great grandmas, grandfathers.
-[Bonnie] Mmm-hmm. -[Kim] They've walked.
Pathway that we're talking about
coming from all the way from the north,
and it leads straight in the same direction
as to where White Sands is.
And it comes in the same pathway
as we see from the north.
And it continues all the way into Mexico.
And it keeps going.
[Ciprian] White Sands has everything
to change the game,
that shows us that we as species
have arrived on the continent
many, many, many thousands of years
before what the accepted paradigm
at the moment is claiming.
[narrator] Ardelean is compelled
to see the footprints firsthand.
He drives 1,200 miles from Mexico to White Sands
to bear witness.
[Ciprian] I found it really important
to drive all the way up here to see...
To see the footprints. And...
it's quite emotional for me to be here.
I don't think there's any other site
in the whole continent discovered
so far that has this power.
You walk on them, you actually walk
on Ice Age sediments that were exposed
by thousands of years of wind blowing the sediments
and forming the dunes.
[dramatic music playing]
Speechless.
Thousands of them everywhere.
Busy every day with their tasks,
with their chores. That's not the life
of somebody who has just arrived.
That is the life of someone who's always been here.
[narrator] Modern science and oral histories combine
to paint a riveting picture,
a human journey that spans thousands of years
from the far north into New Mexico,
from Mexico, all the way to South America.
The beginning of that story is yet unknown.
Ardelean is hoping the elders can help him understand
what he's discovered in Mexico.
[Kim] Our ancestors will show us.
-[Bonnie] Mmm-hmm. -When you go to these areas,
there's some kind of...
It comes from your heart and they will show you.
It's like they let you find things.
-Right. -[Bonnie] Exactly.
That's the same thing I feel...
-[Kim] Mmm-hmm. -...when I'm on field work.
-[Bonnie and Kim] Mmm-hmm. -And somehow,
that's how I think I was taken to the cave
that I found in Mexico, and that's why I'm here.
So for me, this is a learning trip.
Mmm-hmm.
What would be the link
between what we have here,
what your ancestors taught you,
and what I have found there?
And the connection we have is through our migration stories.
We were always traveling, walking.
-[Ciprian] Back and forth. -[Kim] Right. Right. Right.
[Ciprian] And all those tracks that are just...
one on top each other. Just back and forth.
-[Kim] Right. Right, exactly. -[Bonnie] Yes. That was--
[Ciprian] For thousands of years.
When we came down from the north,
as we migrated down south,
according to our stories,
our people went as far as to South, uh, America.
Now, I feel really, really motivated to go...
to go to Brazil,
to see the materials from those sites in Brazil.
I have the feeling that those stone tools somehow
are connected more or less directly
with my case in Mexico.
[narrator] Ardelean travels to the University of Sao Paulo
in Brazil, where the collection
from Santa Elina is housed.
There are 8,000 artifacts to sift through.
He focuses on the materials excavated
from the oldest layers,
between 23,000 and 27,000 years ago.
Like Chiquihuite's tools in Mexico,
they are made of limestone,
but the similarities seem to go far beyond that.
[Ciprian] I thought that coming here to see the Santa Elina materials
would show me some sort of technological connections,
but only that.
An absolute shock to me.
[narrator] Deep in the archives
of a museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil,
Ciprian Ardelean is uncovering
an extraordinary connection.
[Ciprian] I thought that coming here
to see the Santa Elina materials
would show me some sort
of technological connections,
but only that.
But I identified shapes
that are shared between Santa Elina and Chiquihuite.
There are several here that you look at them and you say,
"Oh, my God, is this from my collection?"
An absolute shock to me.
It's just like looking at Chiquihuite all over again.
[narrator] After two days of intensive comparison,
Ardelean calls in the Vialous
to show them what he's discovered.
And I knew that Santa Elina was the right place to come,
-right? -Thank you.
But I didn't expect this level of analogy, honestly.
[speaking French]
[in English] I saw this. I went, "Oh my God,
this is a really spectacular blade."
I mean, it's exactly what I have at Chiquihuite.
[in French]
[laughter]
[speaking French]
[Ciprian in English] Just... have a look at this.
[speaking French]
[responds in French]
[narrator in English] Not only are the blades and scrapers
the same shape,
but they seem to have been made
using the same techniques.
-Wow. -[in French]
-[in English] They obtained the symmetry of the point... -[speaking French]
...by retouching one or two edges
of a transversal flake.
That's a pattern.
[in French]
[narrator in English] Blade after blade, tool after tool...
[in French]
[narrator in English] ...they find small and large
technical details that match.
[in French]
[in English] I came here and I rediscovered
the same types of tools as a Chiquihuite.
So it's not just a vague resemblance.
-[Agueda] Mmm-hmm. -But probably
it's the same culture.
No.
[in French]
Oui.
[in English] So analogous sites does not mean necessarily
the same nation
or the same tribe or the same people.
They mean the same culture.
The tools have similar technology.
[narrator] A closer look also reveals clues
about when and how these ancient people
may have moved across the landscape.
[Ciprian] I also realized something very interesting.
The foundations for those behaviors
were set here in the south
and then these people moved north
and stayed there for longer.
[narrator] If the tool making techniques Ardelean sees
originated in the south
and were further developed in the north,
could this indicate a south to north migration?
Once again, turning established paradigms upside down.
It's a turning point.
Not only for me, for the American prehistory.
I have received more than I hoped for.
[in French]
[in English] If the evidence from Santa Elina is accurate,
then it blows the genetic models out of the water.
It blows the archeological models
out of the water as well.
If we can agree as a community
that they provide unequivocal evidence
of early humans 30,000 years ago in South America,
then that's gonna change everything.
There's no question.
[narrator] The notion that it started
with a single northern entry point
is now up for debate.
Everything is.
What about multiple entry points at the same time,
from all angles?
People moving north, people moving south,
people moving east to west, west to east.
That's what people do around the world.
What about seafaring?
I mean, we are open. That...
That's what makes archeology exciting.
There's absolutely no reason to think that humans
around this period in the last 20,000 years
couldn't have had boats.
People might have taken island hopping
between small islands.
We know that there were Pacific voyagers,
certainly within the last few thousand years old,
settling Pacific islands.
And that is incredibly advanced maritime technology.
There's no reason to underestimate indigenous peoples.
[Ted] I very much had tunnel vision
and everything to me had to do
with the Bering Land Bridge.
By broadening my horizons into coming into contact
with archeologists and indigenous peoples
and I'm much more willing to accept
other ways of thinking about this problem
than I certainly ever used to be.
I'm encouraged to say that we'll come back next year
and basically pick up where we left off
and ideally extend the excavations
back into the rock shelter and deeper.
[Lauriane] I'm very happy that I can carry on this work.
And hopefully, I will vindicate
the work of Jacques Cinq-Mars
and what the Vuntut Gwitchin have kept
telling all their stories.
[narrator] Archeologists, all of us,
must grapple with the idea that our earliest prehistory
may have to be rewritten over and over again.
[Rolfe] Just sitting down here, honoring our ancestors.
When I started with this,
I was searching for the oldest, the first.
Let's be open to whatever that science brings us.
Dig deeper and deeper.
Don't stop where your current paradigm
tells you to stop.
Go all the way to the bottom.
Maybe there's people there, maybe there's people there.
There is no oldest and earliest...
anymore.
[soft music playing]