Vero man

The suggestion that humans might have been present in Florida (or anywhere in the Americas) during the Pleistocene was controversial at the time and most of the contemporary archaeologists did not accept that the Vero fossils could be that old.

Samples of the fossils were sent by Isaac M. Weills and Frank Ayers to the state geologist of Florida, E. H. Sellards, who recognized the finds as Pleistocene animals.

The following year Sellards conducted his own excavations at the site, recovering an engraved mammoth tusk and a bird bone with marks possibly made by humans.

Aleš Hrdlička, T. Wayland Vaughan, Oliver Perry Hay, George Grant MacCurdy, and Rollin T. Chamberlin visited and examined the site.

By the time carbon-14 dating of fossils became possible, about 35 years after the discovery of Vero Man, some of the bones had been lost, and others had been rendered unusable for such testing due to the way they had been preserved with chemicals.

[5] The Old Vero Ice Age Sites Committee announced the discovery of a possible "human living surface" at least 12,000 years old during the 2014 excavation season.