Were Homo Sapiens the First Hominid in North America? A Deep Dive into the Cerutti Mastodon Site 

Honestly, "Steve the construction man who keeps finding sites" sounds like it would make a good kids tv show, like bob the builder but instead of fixing things he just accidentally finds archaeological and paleontological sites and then his buddy the scientist teaches kids about newly found animals and human history discoveries.

Richard Cerutti who discovered this was my grandfather. Pretty cool. Glad it's getting attention.

I appreciate Milo because he doesn't try to dumb his content down for his viewers. He brings his viewers up to understand his content instead.

In regards to that last segment about early humans, what sticks out to me the most are the Cueva da las Manos hand paintings. One Twitter comment put it best, saying "It's like watching ancient people reaching out through time, saying "We were here. We were alive. We were human. We had feelings, thoughts, emotions, all just as complex as yours"." And I think that's such a beautiful thought that perfectly corroborates what Milo is saying, early humans are just that; humans that were from a time long long before ours. They too had an artistic sense that they used to quite literally paint a picture of the world they lived in for generations to come, potentially even eons after they've drawn their last breath

Bro a 3 day premiere?? Enough foreplay and just stick it in In all seriousness you quickly became one of my favorite youtubers. Can't wait to learn about big hairy elephants

To me archeology feels like trying to reconstruct a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle when you find two pieces by the side of the road, and one of them is chewed up a bit and you can't even be sure they're from the same picture. It is amazing the ways y'all found to date and interpret all kinds of evidence and it requires so much interaction with every discipline ranging from physics to medicine to anthropology.

I talked with my anthropology professor about anxiety and depression often. There is interesting discussion on if one of the causes of anxiety and depression are the differences from our current social/work environment and the ones that we as a species adapted to. There’s really not a lot of reasons to think that our ancient homies weren’t having existential crises and worried for reasons beyond the actual threats they faced. Either way, it would suck to think exactly like we do today.

Okay, mind blown; happy woman here. A few months ago I and two friends went and walked the Lehner Mammoth Kill Site in Sierra Vista AZ, just a bit north of the Mexican border. I live about 90 minutes' drive from this, and I and my friends go on local historical tours (cheap and educational!) put on by Parks & Rec or this historical society or the local O'odham tribes or whatever, and this particular walk had about 45 people show up for it-- lots of families with kids, which was encouraging-- and the guy who told us about the site and the bones that'd been found and the Clovis point in the bone (and I knap flint points for fun, so I freaking *LOVED* that bit), he knew what he was talking about. He led us down into a gully where we could see the Black Mat layer, had artifacts (some real, some cast resin replicas) laid out on a picnic table under a handy ramada so we could see what a bone shaft-straightner was like and handle points that I *hope* someday I'll be able to make mine as good as, and he explained atlatls and at the end of the walk we all got to throw darts from an atlatl. My throw was terrible, but one guy sent it a good 90 feet and almost took out the window of an SUV parked down where we supposedly weren't going to be able to reach. After that, I and my friends went back to their place near the San Pedro River and looked out across the brushy desert towards where we'd walked and imagined mammoths browsing in the long winter-brown grass. .....and I had never heard of the Cerutti Mastodon Site. And now I want to go there SO BAD, and maybe I will. It's barely over 400 miles from my home; I could do that in less than 7 hours. ^___^ But what I'm curious about is this: How'd the hominids of the time kill the mammoth and the other large beasts? Atlatls only go back (so far as we know) 17.5K to 18k years ago-- is this a cliff kill? Were there marks in the bones that showed anything like that? Just curious; for all I know, the people who got their survival ensured for a little while longer by those kills found it being hamstrung by wolves and waited til the pack left. Don't care, just curious. Anyway, thank you for this. I'm no archaeologist; I work for a hospital in case research and data retrieval, but I truly loved this, and now I get to show it to my two mammoth-loving friends so we can rave at each other about this. Primitive doesn't mean stupid-- damn straight, and I'd like to have *anyone* who believes that show me their fire-making skills. I *can* light a fire in a few ways my ancestors would recognize, and those ways make me say 'thank the gods for central heating!' I can knap reasonable flint and obsidian points and make them from the bottoms of beer-bottles too. And I've been to White Sands too, and actually spoken to the guy who found the footprints (we talked about sloth hunting) and have no problem whatsoever in believing that 130k years ago, someone sat down to a mammoth dinner in California and went to bed well-fed and hopefully happy. Thank you. (loved your outro!)

I may be in the minority here, but I just wanna say, I had no prior interest in archeology, and stumbled on this channel, and just really like the way you present. Your passion and well written script makes me want to learn more about archeology from you. That said, I deeply appreciate your spark notes, because the assumption that I know anything about theories of early human migration to North America is incorrect.

What inspired my passion towards archeology was actually when a child with craniosynostosis who lived during the middle Pleistocene was discovered back in like '09, the fact that this kid was cared for by our early ancestors proves that we have always had an immense capacity towards loving one another

Hearing the part at 26:58 really made me stop and think about how small we as individuals are. Like, as a species, we have been human for quite literally as long as we have existed. We empathized and cared for the elderly and wounded, we buried our dead, we mourned our losses. It's staggering to know how long we as humans have been doing the things that we do.

Dude it has been SO LONG since someone has made me feel genuine wonder about an educational topic. Literal tears came to my eyes. Good shit

I realize it's a movie but the baby's father in the movie Ice Age was surprisingly depicted as a person; capable of love and ceremony and that's how I prefer to imagine early hominids.

In 30 minutes you've gone and quadrupled my knowledge about the first humans in the Americas. I legitimately thought the Bering land bridge was a proven, uncontested fact and that human migration to the Americas was fairly linear. Also had no idea we were in an ice age. That's what I get for studying the arts lol.

I have to share this video. Trying to explain to some people that if we could pluck a baby from 300k years ago and raised it today no one would be able to tell. That functionally we have been the same for a long long time. I frocking love the idea that humans moved so much earlier than could have been imagined! I hope I love long enough to see this if not proven at least opened up for more scientific possibility. Your a cute kid sir! Thanks for the video.

I'm Sicangu/Choctaw and have done extensive DNA testing (23andMe, GEDMatch, FamilyTreeDNA, MyHeritage, AncestryDNA, Illustrative DNA, genomelink, Nebula genomics, ADNTRO, and other private ones) and reviewed that of others in my immediate family, extended family, and very distant family (1cm or less) that are indigenous. We all have not only significant Neanderthal DNA but also significant Denisovan DNA markers. I ran Native North American DNA privately collected through Latin American DNA service called Somos Ancestria and we show up as closest to the (in order of closest to farthest relation) Mixteca, Zaptoec, Huichol, and Andean Peruvian Aymaras/Quechuas, Pimas, Triqui, and Tarahumara specifically. It's like seeing the migration pattern going from north to south (or south to north) . We also all have Central and South Asian DNA traces with some going as far as to specify Pakistan surrounding countries (not expected as the Mongolian and East Asian which was also present and is well documented) as well as significant reoccurring Austronesian DNA traces and markers. We also show up as having Malagasy trace DNA and markers. Multiple samples were from 70- 90 year old full blood Lakotas from the reservation and from full blood Choctaws living in Oklahoma. We have no Aleutian or Artic DNA. When doing DNA analysis I've also encounter 1-10% that is routinely unable to be identified and the pattern is specific to families and clearly inheritable. I think the peopling of the Americas happened quite a bit before 23, 000 years ago and archaeology has yet to unearth it (assuming there remans evidence and it wasn't all destroyed by rising sea levels in a Kelp Highway scenario). I think it happened in waves with some ancestral populations dying off and merging with new waves. Some had the Austonesia/Denisovan DNA and some had the Neanderthal and Ancient Siberian DNA and at some point they converged in the old world and possibly here. The Cerutti Mastadon Site could be evidence of that. Indigenous people throughout the Americas also have oral histories and legends of smaller human-like peoples here that I'm inclined to believe were probably a remnant population of one of the first waves of modern homo sapien admixed people with significant non-Homo Sapien ancestry and possibly unknown Hominini ancestry.

I swear these new channels are blowing old ones out of the water, Milo, dude, way to go. I cannot express how incredible it is to see someone encouraging that chase of knowledge, your channel is probably one of the top 3 new channels on this site, without a doubt. Thanks for all that you do, and I always appreciate the interesting lessons.

It's a bit tragic that it's virtually impossible to search for more dig sites in the larger area as it has become a concrete jungle. Heck the remains, of whatever Hominin scavenged the Mastodon, might have been destroyed a long time ago. Finally, if other animals have crossed between Asia and North America multiple times, there should be no reason why other hominins couldn't have.

Your passion for this really shows through! You make this usually dry subject interesting if not entertaining! Thanks!

Hi milo! Love your content ❤ would love to hear more about the indigenous oral histories you referenced in this video

I really love how you circle back to them being human and not the "knuckle dragging primitives" we've always been taught. I also appreciate it when you talk about early humans because you don't talk about them like they're just another artifact (although they are), you give them the same amount of humanity as if you are talking to a loved one. Your channel is so so underrated and one of my absolute favourites. Thank you so much for teaching all of us ‪( ˶ ᷇𖥦 ᷆ ˵ )

Remember that a lot of the biggest discoveries in all fields of science started out sounding too incredible to be true. The way I look at it, two possibilities exist here: we're either fundamentally missing something about this site, or it will be regarded in the future as a huge discovery that rewrote some of what we thought we knew about hominid evolution migration. (Of course the fact that it does sound so incredible means it deserves a LOT of skepticism and demands better evidence, but I'm excited to see where it goes 👀 )

My lifelong love of archeology has been given another shot in the arm!! You are a hilarious and transparent presenter!! Love this video!

Hey Milo just started to watch your videos but I love you enthusiasm towards archaeology keep doing what your doing

about the chalk: im autistic and the sound of chalk is usually torture (but i enjoyed milos videos so much i watched anyway), and i had no idea that it was possible to have chalk that didnt sound horrible. i still dont like the sound, but this chalk is actually so much better that i dont even flinch when i hear it. whoever sent it in, i love you lmao

To be honest, I have rarely heard a more touching, insightful, interesting, and inspiring homage to people who are, although long dead, still amazingly inspiring today. I'm delighted that RU-vid recommended to me your channel.

No idea if you will see this but wanted to let you know. Thank you for making this video! I am also an archaeologist (though now i teach high school history) and i am teaching an intro biological anthropology course for the first time. A friend recommended I check you out when I was planning my unit on human evolution. (I also saw the lost lineage videos and those are great! Hope that series continues.) I needed more resources on the debate for how humans got to the Americas and needed something understandable for high schoolers. And your video is perfect! Thank you for summing up current knowledge and I love your breakdown of the archaeological evidence in this particular case (esp since i never got the time to go through it myself). I am looking forward to the debate this will hopefully spark in my class as well as to gettting to talk about archaeology specifically more! So thank you again and keep making videos please!

Milo, the passion and knowledge are so inspiring. You are a refreshing influence in the world.

Man I always get a warm feeling when you talk about ancestral customs with that much passion, i would love if you covered the findings about neanderthals with healed bone fractures, which meant they were taken care of. Man, love really is one the core features of humanity

I’m a teenager who just got back from a high school archeology field school. We did real excavation and mostly my unit had lithics. I just loved when you said lithics because I have gotten used to having to explain to people what it is and such. But you know and it might be simple and stupid but I made me so happy

Your videos are F-in amazing! You’ve got a great skill in conveying actual scientific information in an engaging and fun way. I’m going through your videos in order and I’m absolutely loving it!

This was really well done my dude!

I love that someone is talking about this! And someone who sticks to facts, explores theories, and my favorite point. You're not afraid to admit when we really just don't know, which is 90% of everything we come across...Thanks for your content. p.s. as you get older, you appreciate more simple things, that make life just a tiny bit better.

I love how you talked about our ancestors of the past at the end of your video. What I like to think, is that we aren't much different today compared to thousands of years ago. The main thing is that we tend to build on the knowledge of our predecessors. It takes a genius to invent the first car, but it would have also taken a genius to invent the first cart.

great presentation. love the content and methods of showing evidence and notes about other aspects. have now subscribed.

Well done my friend! Great content!

As an archaeology graduate myself I want to thank you. Firstly, for your objective integrity and secondly for taking me right back to my time in university. The migrations to the Americas was my area of research through proteomics and studying faunal assemblages so this was on point for me. Excellent.

this video made me cry. the idea that early people, our ancestors, could have experienced the world so long ago, that we're just scratching the surface of understanding their lives and experiences, that there could be so much more to discover, brought me to tears. it's so beautiful to find that connection, thank you for talking about this.

Thanks a bunch, man. You explained it very well and great context/background to make it very understandable.

Wow, I’ve been watching your videos for over an hour. You’re an awesome teacher!!!

Thanks Teach! Growing up as a Native American in North Dakota I had teachers that would tell me I was wrong whenever I brought up ancestral stories that carried further back than the Land Bridge would support.

As a avid outdoorsman, finding whatever is nearby for smashing truly embodies the craft.

Great presentation. I appreciate the way you've presented evidence

Keep up the great videos, learning can be fun, and you make it fun.

This video makes me appreciate my high school history teacher even more since he didn’t just cover the land bridge theory but he also presented us with this theory, the kelp, the Clovis and a few other theories in order to challenge what we had always thought of as fact and prove that there’s still a lot that we just don’t know about our history

I remember my Archeology professor laying out all the arguments that have been purposed for a site and letting the class discuss the pros and cons. He didn't give us the answer- probably because he didn't always have one, but would lead us through the ideas and how we can always misinterpreted the data. In my 400 level class with 5 others, he occasionally admitted when he might not know the answer or has changed his opinion on his own work.

i discovery your work this week, i am happy i have tons of material to watch ! thx a lots. its so much interesting. i listen to you from the Area of Montreal, Quebec. i use that allso to tweak my english hehe

This is my favorite video of yours, Milo. You have other ones with funnier jokes, more biting clap-backs, or more gimmicks, but THIS video… I just love the information in it. There’s nothing else to say about it; I love this video purely for the things that it has taught me. I hope that’s high praise for an edutainment channel, because you deserve high praise for how much you’ve taught me about archeology.

How dare you make me wait for this. I’ve been obsessed with this ever since Hancock mentioned it in America Before

Your in depth report made my morning - I love new groundbreaking amazing discoveries BUT even better is critical analyses that make me question my own enthusiasm 😀 Keep up the awesome work 👏

I love your videos and your passion and your takes so much, Milo. I've been into archaeology all my life and I can't believe I've only just found your channel. The way you talk about these people moves me deeply, and I appreciate the emotions behind your presenting so much because I think science often lacks that emotional connection, priding itself on the being "rationally removed". I'm proud to say that I'm enrolled in university after years of illness and am going to start studying archaeology soon. Thank you for your work.

I’d love a series or even just a single video about stuff like that ancient burial site you spoke of with the flowers. That’s super interesting and emotionally powerful and I’d love to hear about more instances of that, as always gray video

28:20 reminds me of something one of my lecturers said to me when I was at university "Non-existent evidence is not evidence of non-existence." The possibility of the Cerutti Mastodon site being a human kill site is where that phrase applies, where the find and arguments around it are so convincing that the only thing getting in the way is that we've found nothing else like it, but the site's alternative explanations just don't seem to be enough compared to it.

15 years ago I did my 4th grade final history project on the Clovis tip, so it's safe to say this video was absolutely devastating to me.

27:35 i genuinely don't think i've ever been able to see so much wonder in a person's eyes. milo, your passion for archaeology is incredible and contagious, and i thank you for every single video you make

I'm so happy to have found your videos they are amazing :D

So as a historian, I never fail to be amazed at just how similar humans are to one another. I love your channel because every aspect of it exists to prove that humans and our hominid relatives are generally the same, that our modern divisions of people by various means is incompatible with scientific evidence of near universal similarity.

I remember reading about a Navajo creation story that said that one of their previous worlds was flooded and the people floated across the sea, encountering many islands, before finally landing on a coastline with tall, rocky cliffs which was their new home. I don't know how accurate this is, because it isn't easy to find any Navajo elders or historians that might have these stories to confirm their validity, but I always felt this lent much more credence to the theory that people got to the Americas by island hopping and following the coastline.

That second graph set up was absolutely beautiful

I love the passion and energy for everything technical

Understanding geological timelines is both awe inspiring and absolutely terrifying. The planet we live on is so old and has changed so much over the years, and our entire history as Humans is a blip on the map. If it's true that our descendants came to the Americas way before we ever imagined, then that'll just be swell

Can't wait to see your take on this! I've had many arguments over this site.

Great coverage.

Delightful video. It gave me the same feeling as I got when I heard about those 700,000 year old rhino bones found in the Phillipines that showed signs of butchering. I warms my heart whenever a discovery is made that hints at other hominin species being capable of more than we previously thought like migrating to North America, or in the case of the rhino bones, to the Phillipines.

The closing minutes of this video were absolutely beautiful, Milo. Well done to you and the editor for striking such a wonderful balance between fact and theory with respect to the history of humanity's ancestors, this was a jaw dropping watch :)

I don’t know how I found history Fabio but I’m digging this channel

Love your insights and your series. Please work on sound quality, the echo is making this hard, other episodes are good soundwise. Keep up the good work!

I really get the amount of frustration you get when people refer to our early ancestors as primitives. Whenever I hear it I think to the grad paper I'm writing, and thinking about the evidence of early dentistry during the neolithic period and I'm talking about drilled teeth at like, 7,500 to 9,000 years back. Or even the dental bridges that are estimated at about 4,500 years back. Though I should note that they were probably placed post-mortem and the earliest functional bridge is estimated at about 2,400 years ago. And while 9,000 is very little compared to 100,000 , it is till staggering. I can never understand this urge of people to always compare themselves to the earlier generation with the desire to come off as better, rather than learn from them. And I'm saying that because I believe our early ancestors exhibited some better dental practices than whatever the fuck we had going on in the 18th century. I had to look at an early 18th century dentistry manuscript and that shit shaved years off my life.

“why are you crying?” the innate human nature to explore, love, and create got to me ok edit: if I wasn’t an artist, I would be an anthropologist with a focus on early Paleolithic art and culture. I love that humans have always been creatures that feel so deeply that there is an innate drive to create and commune with eachother. I think that’s why I have such an issue with people who don’t see the arts as important. You’re telling me that art, the thing we did before we invented WRITTEN LANGUAGE, is useless??? To the pits with you

Happy to have found you, your ideas, and your willingness to expound upon them. Yay science

This is so cool! I want more!!!

Man I love how he explains things very thoroughly with all the big words but I still feel like I understand and have a great time. Wish I had him as a teacher back in school.

Thank you for mentioning that the First Nations people have stories that go far far back in history. This is a fascinating story and is an amazing find

You just presented something I wouldn't have thought much about, and you made interesting. And presented it in a scientific manner, without an excess reliance on ancient aliens. Great job! 👍

Brilliant work here Milo, truly.

When you said it’s a possible theory that Homo sapiens weren’t the first to migrate to the Americas…chills literal chills down my spine 😩. That makes me incredibly hyped. It’s equally exciting to hear someone talk about ancient humans with a deep sense of empathy. They literally learned how to survive & passed it on down to us. A point to your comment about being uniquely human; I think we’ll find out soon that we are all just animals, not in any demeaning sense, but rather that animals think more similarly to us. They have culture. They grieve. We communicate with them non verbally all the time. I know it causes some people to stress about the ethical implications that has, but it’s still very possible. Maybe, (if you’re interested), make a video about the domestication of animals 🐶 🐱 🐦 🐴 🐷 🐮

If one thinks about it enough, and perhaps lets the imagination go a bit, there is something that has an ineffable sadness to it. Could we be seeing evidence of a group of Humans or Human relatives making it into North America before the drowning of Beringia, thus finding themselves isolated from the rest of the Human family, surviving for who knows how many generations, before perhaps environmental pressures or simple bad luck saw them dwindle away, to leave behind a continent filled with silence, until once more our ancestors managed to break into the continent, totally unaware that long distant ancestors had come and passed before themselves? Damn. That was a long sentence, and fairly convoluted. ANYway....

Keep it up! I think your gonna go far.

nice material brother

Chilling and watching this right after visiting the La Brea Tar Pits and learning a whole bunch about mastodons there definitely puts me in a place where I've learned more about mastodons in the past week than in the previous 27 years of my life.

The Robert Frost quote makes me image a group of early humans splitting up at the land bridge, one group would stay while the others ventured out to find better living ground. Maybe a storm or a long bought of heavy weather came by so the exploring group had to press on deeper into this new land. A few generations go by and a small click of them go out in what is now California and hunt down a mammoth that would be found hundreds of thousands of years later.

Low key one of your best videos

This video is really good. Thanks man

Thank you for bringing up the interglacial period. Also, I love that you define things. Having been a teacher, that's key to understanding what's being studied.

In undergrad, I did a semester exchange at University of Alaska Southeast, where I took a course in Alaska Native Studies. I distinctly remember my professor (himself Tlingit) challenging me on my conclusion that indigenous peoples migrated across the Bering Land Bridge, and asked me to consider the oral histories of several Alaska Native Peoples regarding their origin/creation stories. After being confronted with the white sands footprints and this, I find myself ever more convinced that Indigenous Knowledge far exceeds Western Science's understanding of the origin of peoples in the New World.

Seriously dude. Very interesting video.

I loving hearing the different theories about the world This is a great video ❤

i am so unendingly fascinated with and curious about humanity's deep history. what did they believe? what languages did they speak? what was their relationship with other early humans of different species? (the fact that we used to live alongside other species of humans is something else that blows my mind) and what were the cultures of those other human species like? their languages, their beliefs, their practices? there's so, so much we don't know yet and so much more that we will never know because it's been so thoroughly lost. discoveries like this that threaten to completely overthrow our entire understanding of humanity's furthest past really demonstrate how much we just don't know. it's humbling and awe-inspiring. the idea that other human species might have made it to the americas before us and had hundreds of thousands of years to themselves to develop in an isolated fashion is just mindblowing, and i'd love it to be true, and i'd love to know they were like. i swear to god this whole concept is like some shit straight out of some early 20th century pulp fantasy novel a la conan the barbarian. i'm a linguistics nerd, so the idea that they may have had over a hundred thousand years for their languages to evolve completely isolated from those in the old world excites and fascinates me so much. i'd chop off a limb if it meant i could learn about any of the lost and forgotten cultures and languages that existed around the world in our earliest history, but ESPECIALLY this hypothetical one. god i fucking love archaeology and anthropology. sorry for the essay, this comment just turned into some kind of nerd explosion. shit gets out of hand fast when i start talking about humanity's prehistory.

This is incredible. I'd love to see you make a video on our current understanding of humanity's departure from Africa to provide insight as to why this site may not have been left by homo sapiens.

this is the best youtube outro line i have ever seen

I'm loving the content, you've gained a fan, but please hang a blanket in that room to fix the acoustics

I don't have much of a relationship with archeology other than "hey finding stuff out about our history is rad as fuck and might one day help people better understand one another" but I am absolutely floored by this. Seeing the second chart you drew of the time scales between the three sites really put it all i to perspective.

I'm a brazillian history graduate, and in my second semester while studying the "pre-history" (I also don't like this term) of America (the continent aka actual America) we discussed confirmed archeological evidence of human occupation in Chile that dated back to 14 or 15000 years, and even some disputed sites in the Amazon rainforest that, if confirmed as evidence, would be over 40000 years old, that were discovered like in the 80s. Even considering the low estimate of 14000 would render the Clovis First theory unequivocally obsolete, and we've known about it for decades. Our professor constantly mocked the "Clovis first" crowd, comparing them to religious fundamentalists. Of course it's still amazing to know that even the 40000 mark that some thought to be improbable is still pretty recent compared to 130 fucking thousand years

I've watched only a couple of your videos so far but i really appreciate how you call out the racism and biases that exist around history and archeology as we know it. Its really refreshing to hear someone talking about it outside the people who are affected by it

Good program. Very interesting.

Hands down one of the most interesting videos I’ve seen in a while, Keep up the great work man!

I know you laughed about it, but the fact that you are able and willing to actually go through all those scholarly papers and translate it into a way that the rest of us can understand is truly special. You're doing God's work, and we need more people like you. Historic and scientific liaisons to the people are something we truly need, and don't have enough of. I don't know what your actual job is, but you would make an amazing teacher if you're not already.

It takes confidence to say, 'I don't know.' Wish more professionals were comfortable with that thought. Your knowledge to minute ratio needs a new graph with revised intervals. Outstanding, and thanks for sharing the passion.

I didn’t know you were from my state! Super cool!

Native New Mexican here (yes it means both) my particular tribes oral tradition is very well aware of the rough area our ancestors came from before settling in New Mexico. Our tribe ( jicarilla apache) migrated from Canada down to new Mexico.