Cerutti Mastodon site

[1] If true, that would be older by far than the scientific consensus for habitation of the New World, which generally traces widespread human migration to the Americas to 19,000 to 26,000 years ago.

A team of researchers from the San Diego Natural History Museum, led by Thomas Deméré, excavated the site from 1992 to 1993.

[2][5] Analysis from the research team states that the spiral fracturing of the different fragments suggests that the impact occurred when they were fresh and that there is also evidence of percussion.

[1] They suggest that the evidence shows that humans who had manual dexterity and experience with hammerstones and anvils extracted marrow from the mastodon limb bones or raw material to use for tool production.

[2][12] Several critics have argued that the evidence from the site did not definitively rule out the possibility that the cobbles may have been altered due to natural causes.

[13] Michael R. Waters commented, "To demonstrate such early occupation of the Americas requires the presence of unequivocal stone artefacts.

[14] The claim that the stone tools were created by a human was also challenged by a former CalTrans land surveyor, who suggested that the site was affected by heavy earth moving construction.

Furthermore, he states that the impact of the dump trucks would have had “compressive and distorting effects on the sediments and materials enclosed in them” [4] It has further been argued that the man-made fractures on the remains themselves were a result of the construction.

[16] A 2020 paper by Luc Bordes, Elspeth Hayes, Richard Fullager and Tom Deméré supported the suggestion made in the original study that the cobbles were intentionally used by hominins to break the mastodon bones.

The authors concluded that these cobbles served as hammers and anvils in order to break the bones which is consistent with the original findings.

[17] Other authors still expressed skepticism, continuing to contend that the supposed anthropogenic nature of the site was actually the result of road construction.