Announced May 9, 2008, evidence from the archaeological site in southern Chile confirms Monte Verde is the Americas earliest known settlement and is consistent with the idea that early human migration occurred along the Pacific Coast more than fourteen thousand years ago. Most scholars now accept that people entered North America through the Bering Strait land bridge before sixteen thousand calendar years ago. It is not known whether people colonized the Americas by moving along the Pacific coast, through interior routes or both. Researchers envision that coastal migration would have been a rapid process, but seaweed samples and gomphothere meat (meat from an extinct elephant-like animal that was widespread in the Americas twelve to 1.6 million years ago) found at Monte Verde may be signs of slower migration.
Although the site is located fifty miles from the Pacific coast and ten miles from an inland marine bay to the south, researchers identified nine species of seaweed and marine algae found in hearths and other areas in the settlement. The samples were directly dated between 14,220 to 13,980 years ago, a thousand years earlier than other reliably dated human settlements in the Americas and indicate that early immigrants could have moved south along the shoreline exploiting familiar coastal resources to get much of their food. The researchers also found a number of inland resources, including gomphothere meat. The finding suggests immigrants moved back and forth between the coast and inland areas. Evidence to support the coastal migration theory is particularly hard to find because sea levels at the time were about two hundred feet lower than today. As the sea level rose, it covered most of the early coastal settlements. But the seaweed finding, one of the most significant, verifies the migrants' use of coastal resources, making it a likely path.