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“architectural foundations” were found, made of cut wooden planks and small tree trunks staked in place. There were large communal hearths, as well as small charcoal ovens lined with clay. Some of the stored clay bore the footprint of a child 8 to 10 years old. Three crude wooden mortars were also found, held in place by wooden stakes. Grinding stones (metates) were uncovered, along with the remains of wild potatoes, medicinal plants, and sea coast plants with a high salt content. All in all, the Monte Verde site sheds an interesting light on the kind of creatures who might have made use of “crude pebble tools” during the Pliocene and Miocene in Europe or at the Plio-Pleistocene boundary in Africa. In this case, the culture was well equipped with domestic amenities made from perishable materials. Far from being subhuman, the cultural level was what we might expect of anatomically modern humans in a simple village setting even today.

By an accident of preservation, we thus see at Monte Verde artifacts representing an advanced culture accompanying the crudest kinds of stone tools. At sites millions of years older, we see only the stone tools, although perishable artifacts of the kind found at Monte Verde may have once accompanied them.

Finally, we note that Tom Dillehay found in the deepest stratum at Monte Verde a split basalt pebble, some wood fragments, two modified stones, and some charcoal dated at about 33,000 years b.p. (Bray 1986, p. 726).

3.8.7 Early Humans in America and the Eolith Question

The arguments about American sites tens and hundreds of thousands of years old are similar to those that took place among European scientists when the first evidence for prehistoric humans was coming to light. This was noted by anthropologist Alan Lyle Bryan, who wrote (1986, p. 5): “The present controversy over Early Man in America is analogous to that in Europe more than a century ago because the intellectual climate has been dominated for over 50 years by a particular paradigm which has seemed to fit most of the evidence but which fails to explain an increasing body of data. Rather than considering a new paradigm which might make the evidence sensible, skeptics have demanded that all evidence for ‘pre-Clovis’ be judged by more rigid standards of evidence and argument than are applied to later sites. . . . Arbitrary application of such rigid criteria to later sites, including Clovis sites, would relegate nearly all archaeological evidence to the ‘not proven’ category.” It should, however, be noted that the European controversy of the nineteenth century, the full dimensions of which Bryan was probably unaware, is, like the debate on the antiquity of humans in the Americas, still very much an open question. The seriousness with which a modern paleoanthropologist might consider reports of stone tools apparently made by humans in the European Pliocene and earlier is likely to vary in inverse proportion to his commitment to the now-accepted views on human evolution.

Eolithic tools have been found not only in America and Europe but in Australia (R. A. Gould et al. 1971). They have been described as featuring “the casual use of available materials; the lack of emphasis on technological sophistication; the regular discarding of tools after a specific job had been completed; and an attitude which de-emphasizes symmetry, refinement, and systematic continuity in tool types, but instead focuses on the most convenient means of accomplishing the job at hand” (Alsoszatai-Petheo 1986, p. 22).

The human manufacture of the Australian specimens has been widely recognized in the scientific community. So why are not similar tools found in America granted equal recognition? Alan Lyle Bryan (1986, pp. 7–8) stated: “some definitely shaped tool (preferably something ‘diagnostic’) must be present in order to have acceptable ‘proof’ for the presence of Early Man. Anything less is now being labelled a ‘myth,’ and believers of myths cannot be scientific archaeologists. But if the Australian archaeologists had adhered to such strict criteria they