Footprints Before Time Scientists Are Now Beginning To Accept Tom Dillehay’s Findings That The New World Was Inhabited Long Before Anyone Imagined.

There were about 25 or 30 of them, members of an ancient race, and they had found a comfortable campsite on a sandy bank above a creek in what is now Chile.

They erected huts and built hearths for their fires. Game and plants from nearby hills provided food. They made medicines from local herbs.

There came a day when one of the children, perhaps watching preparation of a meal, left three tiny footprints in the soft clay beside one of the hearths.

Now, the footprints - and other evidence uncovered by University of Kentucky anthropologist Tom D. Dillehay and fellow researchers - are shattering 50 years of prevailing scientific opinion about when human beings first arrived in the Americas. The October issue of National Geographic features a report on the discoveries by Dillehay, who is professor and chairman of anthropology at UK.

Those discoveries are revolutionary because Dillehay dated the Chilean footprints and accompanying artifacts as being 12,500 years old - more than 1,000 years older than the previously accepted date for the earliest human habitation in the New World.

“It indicates that people have been in the New World for at least 1,500 years longer than most people have been willing to admit until now,” says Dennis Stanford, an archaeologist with the Smithsonian Institution. “You couldn’t show that until you had the right site, and a competent investigator to put the data together convincingly. That’s what Dillehay and his colleagues have done.”

But human history isn’t easily rewritten. When Dillehay first reported his Chilean findings in the early 1980s, they were attacked by more traditional scientists who refused to accept the possibility humans were here more than a millennium before anyone thought it possible.

Nearly a decade of often bitter scientific debate followed.

Earlier this year, however, the opposition caved in.

After reviewing the evidence, and visiting the site in Chile called Monte Verde, even Dillehay’s strongest critics now acknowledge he’s right and the accepted model or paradigm of human settlement in the Americas is wrong.

The old model said the first humans, ancestors of the Native Americans, reached North America about 12,500 years ago - crossing a land bridge that connected Alaska and Asia - and then spread throughout the New World. But if humans had reached southern Chile 12,500 years ago, as Dillehay found, the first wave apparently must have arrived in North America much earlier - possibly as early as 20,000 years ago.

The New York Times earlier this year compared this archaeological breakthrough to the smashing of the sound barrier in aviation.

“It’s a paradigm-buster,” says Dena Dincauze, a University of Massachusetts archaeologist who once doubted Dillehay’s findings. “If you accept Tom’s site, then a lot of things that we thought we knew have to be changed. And there’s a lot of inertia in that. It’s like moving a mountain.”

Dillehay, a slender, athletic-looking scientist who joined UK in 1979, takes his vindication in a lowkey manner. But he obviously savors finally having been proved right. There were times, he says, when the professional criticism was crushing.

“Probably three things kept us going,” he said. “My colleagues and I knew we were right. The evidence was overwhelming. And the support of my family was very strong.”

Dillehay’s story begins in 1976 when, after finishing a doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, he started working at the University of Southern Chile in Valdivia. One day, a student told him of a place called Monte Verde, 500 miles south of Santiago, where mastodon bones might be found.

South American Indian culture, not mastodons, was Dillehay’s field of interest. Nevertheless, he traveled eight hours by jeep and ox cart to see Monte Verde.

Preliminary digging in the peatbog surface did turn up some old animal bones. But they were cracked and broken, as if shattered by ancient hunters.

To Dillehay, Monte Verde looked like an ancient human site. It looked very old and, most surprising of all, it contained no Clovis points, distinctive stone spear points made by ancient Americans. First discovered in the 1930s near Clovis, N.M., and later found at other archaeological sites around the continent, Clovis points have been dated as about 11,200 years old. No older artifacts had been found, and for the last half century scientists have assumed the people who made Clovis points were the New World’s first human inhabitants.

Several times, scientists thought they had found sites older than Clovis, but careful analysis always proved them wrong. Clovis became such an accepted yardstick any archaeological site in the Americas without the spear points was likely to be dismissed.

Dillehay knew he risked similar skepticism by announcing he had found a pre-Clovis site. But he pressed on, financing the work with his own savings and recruiting help from staff at the University of Southern Chile. After joining UK, he continued to work at Monte Verde whenever time allowed.

He and his team found animal bones, charcoal, tools made from stone, wood and bone, building foundations and footprints. The bombshell came when radio-carbon dating showed these items to be 12,500 years old - more than 1,000 years older than the accepted Clovis benchmark.

Predictably, many scoffed. Some suggested the radio-carbon dating was contaminated and therefore wrong. And some argued the handmade stone tools Dillehay found really weren’t tools at all, just weathered rocks.

Dillehay stuck to his theory. But the tide really didn’t turn until this year, when he published the second of two volumes, totaling 1,500 pages, detailing the Monte Verde findings. The book impressed scientists. The clincher came in January, when Dillehay invited about a dozen of his principal critics to examine his records and view Monte Verde itself.

Some skepticism still lingers. The University of Arizona’s C. Vance Haynes, who visited Monte Verde and is one of the main defenders of the old Clovis model, says Dillehay’s findings won’t be fully confirmed until someone duplicates them by locating another pre-Clovis site.

“Of all of us who went down there, I was more skeptical than most,” Haynes said. “The impression I got was everybody really wanted this to be an accepted site.”

Dillehay dismisses such comments as only a continuation of the skepticism he’s long faced. “It’s the way science is done,” he said. “You break down one barrier, and another is put up.”