But the dig site turned out to be even more revelatory—and now, with a paper in the journal Nature—controversial. See, this site wasn’t just catnip for the paleontologists, the diggers who study all fossils. It soon had archaeologists swooping in to study a number of stone tools scattered around the bones, evidence of human activity. After years of debate over the dating technology used on the mastodon, a group of researchers now believes that they can date it and the human tools to 130,000 years ago—more than 100,000 years earlier than the earliest humans are supposed to have made it to North America.This is controversial not just because of the dating techniques, but because many academic positions, grants, and reputations are based on the current notion of when humans arrived on the continent. There is also a pinch of what is sometimes called "political correctness" to the current theory, so don't expect contrary evidence to be warmly embraced.
More here from the Washington Post.