Original subtitles

All across the world, our ancient ancestors

left behind towering mysteries and enchanting myths.

That looks like a magic wand.

As an actress, I've been lucky enough

to peek behind the curtain

at some of these ancient sites.

I've never been in a crypt before.

And it's ignited an insatiable curiosity in me

to know more about these lost worlds...

It's amazing that under our feet there's so much history.

...some of which are still buried deep in our distant past.

That is amazing!

I'm from Tennessee,

so this is what it looks like where I'm from.

It's overgrown. I mean, it's woodsy.

This is how I grew up.

I'm deep in the backcountry of southeastern Pennsylvania,

and although parts of these never-ending forests

and freshwater streams might feel untouched,

over 10,000 years ago,

they were home to some of the first humans

to ever live in America.

So, when I was in school,

the theory that I was being taught

was that people migrated into the Americas

about 13,000 years ago from Asia

and across the Bering Strait into Alaska,

and that's how the first people came here.

In nearly every history book taught in nearly every school

is the theory that humans first came to North America

13,000 years ago

by crossing a land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska

and then settled throughout the continent.

As a kid, I didn't question it,

but now the door has sort of been pushed open

for people to start asking that question again...

"When were people here in America?"

In recent years, groundbreaking new scientific discoveries

are challenging our concept of early American man,

and our history books might not just be wrong,

but really, really wrong.

I've come to an extraordinary archaeological site

outside the small town of Avella, Pennsylvania...

...and I'm here to meet leading archaeologist Jim Adovasio.

His findings from this site are challenging

the established history of man's origin in America.

How are you? Megan.

Jim. Nice to meet you.

Same here.

What is in here? I can see through.

It looks interesting.

Essentially, that's where the main excavations occurred

or began in 1973. Okay.

Jim has overseen archaeological digs at this site

for over four decades,

but it's only recently that his discoveries here

have set the archaeological community ablaze.

It might look like a set from an apocalyptic sci-fi movie,

but the truth is, our origins are buried

deep within this rubble.

All of these tags that you see... Yeah.

...are devices for the excavators

to mark the layers of the site,

the various layers of sediment.

Some of these moments in time

are equivalent to literal pages in a book.

The layers are like chapters in a book,

and then all of these layers together are the book... Yeah.

...of human utilization of this location.

The freshwater of the nearby Ohio River

and an ample supply of flint for making tools

made this area an optimal spot for prehistoric man to settle,

and evidence is everywhere.

This whole thing here is one layer of the site,

but it consists of micro layers.

Some of them, when you rehydrate them

with this sprayer,

come out quite dark,

and this is ash and charcoal from the succession of fires.

One, two, three, four different fires

were built there by people in subsequent visits

4,000 or 5,000 years ago.

Up here... Is that also...

The red down there, is that another?

Yes, that's another fire.

Yeah. There's a whole series of even earlier ones.

This down here is about 8,000, 9,000 years ago.

Using the layers of this sandstone,

each layer representing nearly 200 years,

Jim and his team have precisely mapped

when and how humans were using this area.

Evidence of fires prove humans were living here

9,000 years ago,

but what's buried even deeper

is the real key to Jim's findings.

As we excavated deeper and deeper and deeper,

going back further and further in time,

we finally got to this little step,

which is of Clovis Age.

The Clovis Age is widely accepted

as the period of time 13,000 years ago

when humans first arrived and settled in America.

There ought not to have been anything deeper than this

that was associated with humans,

but as we continued to dig,

we continued to find indications of a human presence.

There should not have been people,

but there was stuff deeper, and it was older.

Over here, we found material

that's about 16,000 radiocarbon years old.

Wow.

According to Jim's findings,

humans were in this area of Pennsylvania

as far back as 16,000 years ago.

That's 3,000 years earlier

than our history books say is possible.

None of us could have ever imagined

that sort of thing at the time. Yeah.

We had no idea it would be this old,

and it included a series of pits like this one

along with the associated debris of a camping event...

The stone tools, bits and pieces of bone,

the charcoal, the ash that would have been present

as campfire-related trash.

So 16,000 years ago, not 13,000,

humans were here, 35 miles outside of

modern-day Pittsburgh,

living, settling, and warming themselves by campfires.

A 3,000-year discrepancy might not sound like a lot,

but think about what life was like for humans

just 3,000 years ago.

David was king of the ancient Israelites,

India first started using metal tools,

and in the Middle East,

the world's first alphabet was just emerging.

We were very surprised at this development.

Personally, I didn't believe what I was seeing.

Were the dates we were getting back from the laboratories

somehow an error,

or were there really people here

thousands of years

before they were supposed to be here?

And so the excitement didn't come until later,

until we'd exhausted all the what-if scenarios,

and then suddenly, there were no more what-ifs.

What's that like to disprove yourself?

- To find out that you're wrong? - Yeah.

We, of course, rushed into town

and sucked down as much beer

as humans can drink in a 24-hour period.

Was there resistance when you put this forward?

Oh, huge, huge.

The majority of the field

did not believe

that anyone had been here before Clovis,

and so they resisted even the implication

that that was possible.

That was so threatening

to what the received wisdom was,

but now as a result,

I look at the past through a different lens.

There had to have been people here earlier.

Our time line of human history in America

is off by 3,000 years...

We're dead wrong about the spread of humankind,

I mean, dead wrong.

...which begs the question,

what are we missing in this massive blind spot

of human history?

My fifth-grade history book

told me that the first humans came to America

13,000 years ago,

but what if that widely accepted belief

is dead wrong?

New science suggests that our time line of human history

may be off by 3,000 years,

and the first man arrived in America 16,000 years ago,

so what could we be missing in this massive blind spot

of human history?

- Nice to meet you. - Nice to meet you.

How are you? Yeah.

Well, welcome to Qualcomm Institute.

Attempting to shed light on this blind spot

is Dominique Rissolo,

a veteran archaeologist

at the University of California, San Diego.

Using state-of-the-art technology

and the latest techniques,

he's searching the continent

for North America's earliest human remains.

Is this your lab we're going to?

This is our lab off to the right here.

Wow, that's cool. Yeah, well, welcome.

It's like being in a "Mission Impossible" movie.

Yeah.

You know, part of the reason it's been so difficult for us

to really understand

the story of the peopling of the Americas

is because we find it so difficult

to locate those humans.

The human remains, they're rare.

For a variety of reasons,

these sites were very difficult to find.

They didn't preserve very well,

and so what we're learning

is that one of the most promising frontiers

for Paleo-American studies

are in the caves and cenotes

of the Yucatan Peninsula.

Due to thousands of years of weather erosion

and human destruction,

most of the evidence of early man in America

has been lost to time,

which led Dominique and his team

to look in an unlikely place...

Underwater,

where archaeological remains

are sheltered from the destructive powers of time.

In 2007, divers were exploring a massive underwater cave system

off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula

when they made a shocking discovery.

We're working at a site called Hoyo Negro

where divers came upon a huge pit,

and they dive down to the bottom,

and the first thing that they noticed

were the bones of extinct Ice Age animals

at the bottom of this pit,

and one of the lead divers

comes across a set of human remains

of a young woman who we call Naia.

Wow. And this is all underwater?

All underwater. But I was completely blown away,

and I knew immediately that we were dealing with

a very early individual and a very, very important find.

Naia is believed to be 13,000 years old,

making her the oldest skeleton ever discovered in the Americas,

and although she was found deep underwater,

that would not have been the case thousands of years ago.

That used to be above sea level at some point.

It did, so at one time, elephant-like animals

were walking through here...

Saber-toothed cats, cave bears,

giant ground sloths, and people.

Where are the bones? Are they here?

Are they somewhere else? They're not here.

The bones we recovered in 2016,

and they're at the National Museum of Anthropology

in Mexico City.

With Naia's bones preserved in Mexico,

Dominique is using 3-D printing technology

to explore every aspect of her anatomy

to try and figure out who this mysterious woman was

and what she can tell us about who was here before her.

There's so much information in the skeleton... Yeah.

...that tells us about who Naia was.

Was she small?

That seems small and delicate.

She was small, and she stood at about 5 feet,

was maybe around 100 to 105 pounds,

and we also know from her skeleton

that she had given birth. Mm.

We can tell that she was about 15 to 16 years of age

when she died... Oh, God.

...and led a really hard life.

Using advanced point-based image technology,

Dominique and his team have created a visual representation

of what Naia would have looked like.

Wow. It's pretty crazy.

For us, it gives a face to someone

who has been so important to us as researchers.

Look at her, and you see her,

and that all of a sudden becomes a very real person

because you gave someone a face.

Now there's a face to this... Indeed.

...mystery that creates instant empathy...

Mm-hmm... for whatever she went through.

We don't often think of what life was like

for these individuals.

Although there are still many questions

swirling around who early American man was,

the key to why these early humans

would have been in America 16,000 years ago

could still be buried underwater.

So, Dominique has a powerful tool

to search for the answers without leaving this building.

After you.

And welcome to the sun cave.

This lab is equipped with one of the most advanced

and powerful virtual-reality systems in the world.

Wow.

It's pretty crazy. Yeah.

So, we are now in Hoyo Negro.

New archaeology suggests that humans may have

arrived in the Americas 3,000 years earlier

than science previously thought,

so what lost people could have existed

in that massive blind spot in American history?

And we'll head downstairs,

and we can virtually enter one of these caves.

After archaeologist Dominique Rissolo and his team

discovered the oldest human remains in North America,

a 15-year-old girl named Naia buried in an underwater cave,

they've been using state-of-the-art technology

to virtually recreate this cave system

to search for more evidence of early American humans.

It's pretty crazy. Yeah.

So, we are now in Hoyo Negro.

Wow. It's amazing.

So, I wanted to introduce you... Super cool.

...to Megan. Hi. Oh, hi.

How are you? This is Vid Petrovic, a colleague.

Vid's developed the point-based visual analytics engine

that drives our research.

Vid Petrovic and his team have spent thousands of hours

diving and capturing high-resolution images

of every inch of the Hoyo Negro cave system

where Naia was found.

Using advanced AI, they pieced those images together

to create a three-dimensional space

that scientists can swim through.

Imagine the cave divers.

I mean, they are sort of our astronauts

going off to these remote and hostile environments,

collecting these data in the form of images. Yeah.

So these data become the means by which the scientists,

who may never dive to the bottom of the pit,

can go there virtually.

When they're diving, the guys that actually go down,

it's obviously very dark down there,

so they're not seeing much.

They're not seeing this,

and so this is a totally different version

of that world they already explored.

We're inside the pit.

We're actually at the bottom of the pit.

Is that the edge?

That's the edge of the pit, yeah.

So, again, it would have been completely dark for them,

so for us, we can turn on the lights,

go inside, and kind of see where Naia came to rest.

We see her skeleton in two separate places,

so in other words,

when she was decomposing and floating around,

she came apart about midsection,

so the lower portion of her skeleton is in one area,

and the upper portion is another.

So, if we look over here, this is the lower portion

of Naia's body.

As we move in, you can see the femura,

both the right and left femur.

And over here, you can see her pelvis, the sacrum,

and they're sort of tucked in over here.

And then as Vid sort of takes us to the upper half

of her skeleton,

you can see her mandible here.

- Yeah. - I mean, the fact that, I mean,

this is such detail that you could actually see...

- Yeah. - ...the crags in her teeth.

I mean, it's just remarkable.

So, there's a story here, and there are, of course,

so much of these submerged cave systems

that has yet to be explored,

and there are potentially other skeletons

not unlike Naia that may reside

deep inside these cave systems.

Now that the technology is here,

archaeology is ultimately headed underwater,

and there's so much to find

beneath of the surface of the water at this point.

So, I'm heading out on the open water

off the coast of California

to find answers that are locked deep below the sea.

How long have you guys been doing this?

Well, the project that we're working on now,

it's in our fourth year.

I'm meeting with Amy Gusick and Jillian Maloney,

scientists who are searching the waters

off the Pacific Ocean 2,200 miles

from where Naia was discovered

to hopefully uncover hard, physical evidence

of early humans.

All of the area that we're interested in looking at is,

I mean, it's under us right now on this boat.

So, we know that there is a lot of landscape here

that's been submerged that was available

when you had the earliest occupation in the New World.

During the last ice age about 20,000 years ago,

ocean water was being sucked up to form the ice shelf,

which lowered the sea level

and exposed thousands of square miles

of livable coast along California.

This was the ideal place for early man to live

because they could fish and build shelters.

When the ice age ended, the shelf melted,

submerging what was once livable coastline,

making the search for early man in this area

an underwater one.

So, this is our map of the sea floor

off southern California.

During the last glacial period,

the coastline would have been out

at the edge of that wide, flat area,

and the area that we're searching for

is sort of this red area around the coastline

because that would have been land,

and so people could have used that whole area to inhabit.

People were living along the coastline,

and that coastline has changed,

and a lot of it is underwater,

which now means that archaeology has to go aquatic.

They have to go under and start looking for things,

which is challenging,

but also, that's just a whole new universe.

How do you go about looking for the things

that you're looking for?

I'll take a long tube,

and we'll just plunge that down into the sea floor,

and as it plunges down into the sea floor,

the sediment fills up in the tube,

and within there, we're preserving

the different layers of sediment.

So, ideally, we're going to find evidence

that there were indeed people in these submerged environments

that date back at least 16,000, 17,000,

possibly even 18,000 years old.

And we have evidence of people

populating the Americas 13,000 years ago,

but let's say that she's right,

and it could go back 18,000 years ago.

Between 13,000 and 18,000,

that's a huge gap which will rewrite history

if they find what they think that they're going to find,

and that's mind-blowing.

How long do you think it'll take?

Much more complex, I think, than,

you know, people really realize.

There has got to be burials somewhere.

There has to be!

Amy and Jillian's search for answers

may take over a decade,

but could the key to understanding our lost history

lie not in the future,

but rather in the ancient traditions of our past?

Ugh.

I've uncovered new science

suggesting that humans may have arrived in the Americas

nearly 5,000 years earlier than previously thought,

but with much of the key evidence

buried beneath rising waters,

I'm turning to legends and oral histories

to try and piece together this lost time.

This smells of sage, lavender.

I do smell something.

Chief Joseph Riverwind is from the Arawak Tribe

and is an author and expert on Native American oral history.

His wife, Laralyn, is a doctor of natural medicine

from the Cherokee people.

We've been looking into the whole idea of

when did people start to populate the Americas.

When did that happen, and who were those people?

And I know if someone had a oral tradition

that there was treasure buried in the backyard

of a house that I built,

I would go dig up exactly where the tradition says it is.

Like, why wouldn't I do that? Right.

And I feel like there's, you know,

there's so much there to explore.

Native Americans populated this area over 3,000 years ago

and have recently been proven to have direct DNA connections

to some of the earliest humans in America,

but the legends and stories of Native Americans

might tell us more than modern science ever can.

Well, the understanding

of how oral tradition is passed down...

It isn't just telling the story around a campfire,

which obviously would change with each person

that hears the story.

The stories are learned word for word,

so when we hear a traditional story,

it's the same as we heard it 500 years ago

or 1,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago.

There's an integrity that's kept to it.

So, what is the truth in your oral traditions?

When did people come into the Americas?

So, in oral tradition,

our stories say that the land was all one piece,

one solid land mass, and we were all one tribe.

We were all one people.

But then our people tried to build

what we called a sky tower to the creator,

and Creator became angry with the people.

And there's flood stories.

You find the Choctaw talk about Creator

speaking to a man

and telling him to build a great canoe

and put two of every animal in it... Mm, mm-hmm.

...because he would be flooding the Earth.

These various Native American stories

all seem to line up with what science tells us

about Earth's history.

There was an ice age where the lands were connected.

This ice melted.

Sea levels rose,

and massive floods spread across the world.

Although these oral traditions credit the gods,

they're reporting on the same events.

Well, you've got native tribes

who say we've been here for thousands of years,

so I think that more and more people are beginning to listen

and to hear what our people have to say.

So, what does oral tradition say about who those people were

that were here?

There's a heavy oral tradition

of "other" beings within native storytelling,

and I don't even want to call them a race.

It's a species because they're not just human.

They're hybrid.

And these stories were found, you know, the

Shawnee, the Iroquois, the Cherokee,

the Navajo, the Lakota,

but you have this whole race of giants

that populated the land, and they were not good.

They were very sadistic. They were very evil.

Muskogee called the giants isti papa,

which means "man-eater"... Mm.

...and they were notorious for taking children and...

- Mm. - ...making meals of them.

They would grab a warrior and just bite his head off

and drink the blood. Ugh.

I mean, these guys were, like, 9 foot, 10 foot tall.

- Yeah. - It was just...

- Sometimes bigger. - Yeah, sometimes bigger.

And they're in almost all of the Native stories.

You ask a Native person, "Who built this big mound

or this Indian mound over here?"

And it's always, "The giants built them."

Mm-hmm.

According to the Riverwinds,

giants are all over the oral histories

of dozens of Native tribes

from the Iroquois in the northeast

to the Comanches in the Great Plains

to the Navajo in the southwest.

These tribes were hundreds of miles apart,

but all shared a common story

that early man mingled with giants.

What happens when you present these ideas

to other people who are maybe more mainstream,

like, coming from a scientific background?

I think there's some hesitancy in the scientific community

of believing oral tradition.

We understand how fantastic this sounds,

but in order to truly have a scientific approach to it,

you have to look at everything. I'm with you.

I don't understand why it's so hard for people

to want to be open.

How can you say that you're right and that's a fact,

and that's the end

if you left half of the things unexamined?

It doesn't make any sense.

So, have we not only missed thousands of years

of human history,

but also a lost species of giants

that roamed these lands?

1899, an 8-foot-1-1/2-inch giant skeleton...

1933, 7-foot-5 skeleton...

It's in the Smithsonian records.

It's in the "New York Times."

There's over 1,500 accounts in the historical record

talking about giant skeletons.

I've uncovered new science

suggesting that humans arrived in the Americas

thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

So, what lost people could have existed

in that massive blind spot?

According to Native American oral traditions,

the answer is shocking.

There's a heavy oral tradition

of giant people.

Could there really have been a mysterious breed of giants

roaming the Americas?

Nice to meet you. How are you?

Have a seat.

To explore this controversial theory,

I'm meeting with historian Jim Vieira,

who has spent over two decades investigating

the evidence of giants in America

and pioneering the science of giantology.

So, what is giantology, and is that a real thing?

It's funny. It's kind of, like, tongue-in-cheek

because I'm an expert in something

that's not supposed to exist.

But there were a lot of researchers

that are looking into the possibility

that giants existed in the past,

and they look into Biblical lore and historical documents

and, you know, try to weave the story with new science

and see if it was a reality. Mm-hmm.

I don't want to try to convert you

to the church of giantology, but...

I'm already... I'm a pre-convert.

Oh, nice. That's cool.

So you don't have to convert me.

Well, I mean, it's in a lot of ancient literature.

They reference giants. It's everywhere.

It's ridiculous.

Ever since Sunday school when I learned about Goliath

towering over the Israelites

or Nephilim,

an angel mixed with a human

to create giant offspring,

I've been obsessed with the idea of other beings

roaming this Earth,

and it doesn't end at the Bible.

There are also legends of giants in the "Epic of Gilgamesh"

and in the ancient writings of Homer and Virgil.

But is there any hard evidence to support these legends?

The reality is there's over 1,500 accounts

in the historical record

in archaeological and anthropological bulletins,

the Smithsonian ethnology reports,

littered throughout newspapers,

buried obscurely in town and county histories.

There's a lot here. Yeah.

Check this out.

Right here is a historical marker in Kansas,

and there were seven-foot warriors here.

"Monster skulls and bones", "New York Times".

It's talking about a Georgia burial mound,

giant skeletons that were found in the mounds.

Wow. It's pretty crazy.

From a massive skeleton

allegedly found on Catalina Island,

which was once owned by the Wrigley family,

to Carnegie Museum verifying giant remains,

there are hundreds of these accounts

associated with some of the most well-respected institutions

in America,

including the most of respected of them all.

Colonel Norris from the Smithsonian

unearthed a 7'6 skeleton.

It's in the Smithsonian records.

It's in the "New York Times."

It's verified, all of the measurements.

Okay. So, the ones that we've come across so far

have all been seven feet.

The tallest one was eight feet.

To play devil's advocate, there's a lot of NBA players

and athletes that are in the seven-foot range,

and they don't have the gigantism,

so are these really giants,

or are these just larger people

like the ones we have walking around today?

The incidents of seven-foot and taller people

that were found in the burial mounds

is a much higher proportion

than the smaller slice of seven-foot and taller people

you see today. Yeah.

And a lot of them were described

as enormous with massive jaws,

massive skulls, massive bone structure,

like almost some kind of,

like a hybrid or a different kind of human.

- Yeah. - We have stories like this.

Nine-foot skeleton...

Right, which is well out of, you know, normal human range.

That's "Scientific American,"

and it was listed in several other academic journals.

Is there any evidence of where that skeleton went?

Did they put it back where they got it?

In 1990, there was the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act

to protect Native American remains,

so a lot of these skeletons went back in the ground.

A lot of them, frankly, they just can't be found.

Many say a nine-foot skeleton was found

in a Native American burial mound

and removed without the permission of the Shawnee Tribe

that the land belonged to.

With the passing of a new law in 1990,

the remains were returned to the tribe

and haven't been seen since.

So, if there were all of these giants

that have been found in America,

where did they come from?

So, one theory is that we have another player

in the human drama,

and they were found in this area in the Altai region of Siberia,

and they're called the Denisovans,

and these were particularly large beings that were here

around 40 or 50,000 years ago,

and the only evidence we have of the Denisovans

is two extremely large teeth.

In 2010, a team of archaeologists

digging in a remote cave in Russia

discovered two teeth belonging to what DNA testing confirmed

was a newly discovered species

that shared a common origin with Neanderthals.

That is a very close approximation to the size...

Yeah. ...of the tooth.

It's significantly larger. There's no question.

They were so large that they thought

it was a tooth of a cave bear,

and they took it to the Max Planck Institute,

and they realized it's a human cousin.

One of the interesting things is that we found

that there was a small percentage of Denisovan DNA

in Native populations in the United States.

So, according to this theory,

50,000 years ago,

a large human-like species called Denisovans

populated the Asian landscape.

These ancient giants migrated into the Americans

and interbred with humans,

creating giant hybrids,

and in fact, traces of Denisovans' DNA

have been found in Native Americans.

So it's just this amazing find,

and it might answer all of these questions

you're looking into, this time gap.

There is a story here of human origins

that is vastly different from what we think,

and Denisovans might play a key role

in what's going on here.

Evidence of a half-giant, half-man hybrid race

walking these ancient lands

is a new twist in human history in the Americas,

and new evidence is being discovered every day

that is rewriting that history...

These are fossils of Ice Age mammoths.

...including one find that could prove our time line

isn't off by 3,000 years...

When I see this, it affects me for some reason.

It's crazy.

...but by over 100,000.

What he discovered is amazing, and if it's accurate, I mean,

it blows everything we thought we knew away.

New evidence suggests that humans

may have arrived in the Americas

thousands of years earlier than previously thought

and were sharing the land

with a lost species of half-man, half-giant.

There's over 1,500 accounts

in the historical record

of enormous, hybrid-like people.

How can we have our time line of human existence

in America so wrong,

and what else could we be missing?

How are you? Hi, Megan. I'm Tom.

Nice to meet you. How are you doing?

- Welcome to the museum. - Thank you.

So, we have some fossils upstairs... Great.

...and some other things that I'd like to show you.

Okay. I want to see other things. So, let's go upstairs.

I'm meeting with Dr. Tom Deméré, a world-renowned paleontologist.

His groundbreaking studies of ancient mammals

could provide a looking glass into early man.

Whoa...

those are not small bones.

No. These are fossils of Ice Age mammals...

Oh. ...mostly mammoths.

For instance, this is a femur, a leg bone...

Oh, my God. ...of a mammoth.

I don't know why I'm so taken by bones.

When I see this, it affects me for some reason.

It's crazy. Well, look how big that is.

- That's an ancient femur bone. - Right.

Tom's laboratory is filled with thousands of ancient bones

from saber-toothed cats, mammoths,

and other Ice Age mammals that roamed the Americas

hundreds of thousands of years ago,

but these findings all pale in comparison

to a skeleton he just recently pulled from the ground.

Let me show you a few more treasures from the past.

While a team of construction workers

in San Diego, California, were building a highway,

they stumbled upon pieces of a massive skeleton.

Tom and his team were called in, and after 5 months of digging,

they unearthed hundreds of broken

and scattered bones from a mastodon,

an extinct and distant relative of the elephant.

This is a map of the excavation.

We see ribs here and there.

We see vertebrae from the upper back here.

We see a toe bone over here,

so it was scattered in no sense of order

to the skeleton.

Did you guys end up

getting a date for this mastodon?

Yes, we did.

So, we eventually came up with a very accurate date

of 130,000 plus or minus 9,000.

130,000 years ago...

Oh, my God. It's so ancient.

130,000 years ago,

it's believed that humans were extremely primitive

and lived only in Africa,

parts of Europe, and southern Asia,

but these ancient bones aren't just extremely old.

They're like nothing else Tom has ever seen.

So, what's interesting is we have parts of femurs,

but they're broken, sharply broken,

so that's just a piece of one of these 3-foot-long leg bones.

Yeah. And that's all we found.

Found pieces of it, and even the pieces that we did find

could not be put back together to form a complete femur,

so that was a real puzzle,

and that was the real indication

that this site was really unique.

Usually when mastodons are found underground,

the skeletons are partially intact

and all in the same general area,

but this mastodon was broken into over 300 pieces

and spread across 400 feet.

Even more unusual was the fact that the ribs were intact,

but the legs and femurs were broken into dozens of pieces.

So, we posed in our minds several different hypotheses

to explain what caused this...

Fast-flowing streams carrying sediment and rocks

and perhaps the carcass and burying the carcass.

If this is all due to just fast-flowing water,

we wouldn't find ribs intact and leg bones broken.

We'd find legs intact and ribs broken.

- 'Cause ribs are more fragile. - Right.

So, a purely geological explanation

in terms of just water flowing didn't fit,

and so we thought of other scenarios,

one of which is trampling,

but we didn't see any marks on the bones

that suggest trampling.

We kept coming back to this idea

that, well, humans perhaps were responsible for this

because not only did we find bones and teeth and tusks,

but we also found five large cobbles...

Rocks about 30 pounds...

And the rocks really stand out as an anomaly

and part of the story that's really quite intriguing.

These five large cobbles were found here

in this cluster of broken leg bones.

This suggests that the breakage

was occurring at this location,

telltale signs that would indicate human activity.

That's really amazing.

The five large rocks found by the mastodon skeleton

are not naturally occurring within the sediment layer

where the bones were found,

so Tom and his team believe that early humans

used these as tools to break apart

the large femurs of the mastodon,

explaining the strange bone patterns.

130,000 is... Mm-hmm.

...much older than humans were thought to have been

in the New World. Much, much older.

Much, much older, by an order of magnitude. Yeah.

And that's where it became pretty exciting.

This is astounding.

If Tom is right,

our history books weren't off by 3,000 years.

They were off by more than 100,000 years.

This completely shatters all other archaeological theories

on when humans first arrived in America.

How has it been received?

Well, it's had mixed reviews.

Most of the reaction has been very negative

because it goes against the existing paradigm,

and one of our suggestions is

that paleontologists discovered this

'cause they're working in deposits

that are 130,000 years old,

but archaeologists don't look in sediments

that are 130,000 years old.

So the challenge is, well, let's start

looking in older deposits

'cause if you don't look, you're not gonna find evidence.

- Yeah. - What if we're right?

I mean, that's pretty exciting,

and it doesn't change everything.

It just adds a new chapter to this... Yeah.

...peopling of the Americas.

What he discovered is amazing, and if it's accurate,

that's pretty crazy to think about

because it's so drastically different

from what we were taught.

They can't say if it's modern human

or if it was Neanderthal.

Maybe they were giants.

They don't know.

No one has been digging deep enough

to even look for people 130,000 years ago,

so it's likely that the evidence is there.

It just hasn't been sought out.

The more they find, the more questions there are,

and the mystery just keeps getting bigger and deeper,

and that's really exciting because it's ever-expanding.

It's like a lifelong adventure.

There may be more than 100,000 years of missing pages

from the history of America,

pages that could include anything,

even giant ancestors from a mysterious species.

A lot of them were described as enormous,

like a hybrid or a different kind of human.

There is still so much more to uncover

about who we are and where we come from.

We had no idea it would be this old.

The answers to our past remain waiting to be discovered.

It's all out there...

They're on the precipice of a lot of new discoveries

which will rewrite history.

...and now it's just a matter

of when we find it.