Live Science Today: Monte Verde controversy and heatwave lashes the West

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Today's top story

The Americas settlement question remains unsettled

A view of a creek with green grass on the banks and cows in the background.

A view of the Monte Verde archaeological site along the Chinchihuapi Creek in Chile, which was taken in 2012. (Image credit: Geología Valdivia (CC BY 2.0))

A key archaeological site in Chile could be thousands of years younger than first thought, according to a controversial study that threatens to rewrite the earliest history of when humans settled South America.

Monte Verde, a Paleolithic archaeological site in the mountains of southern Chile, stands as one of the oldest human settlements in the Americas and is believed to be 14,500 years old. Its discovery in 1976 fundamentally changed the way archaeologists see the arrival of the first Americans on the continent, as the site is 1,500 years older than the arrival of Clovis people through North America.

But a new study claims the site could be more than 10,000 years younger than first thought, completely upending the accepted understanding of the site and prehistoric migration patterns. But other experts have called the new paper "egregiously poor geological work."

The trend

Feeling the heat

A view of a lighthouse with the sun setting in the background.

Temperatures are soaring across the Western U.S., with some regions breaking all-time March records. (Image credit: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)

A historic heatwave slamming the American West is on course to set monthly records in more than 140 cities, from California to the Plains, this week.

And it's far from an ordinary one — with the Arizona desert community of Martinez Lake reporting a high of 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius), smashing the record for the highest March temperature ever logged in the U.S.

Some scientists are arguing that the planet's increasingly wacky weather extremes are signs that human-driven climate change is accelerating. The debate is happening at the same time as the Iran war, which is already making American consumers reconsider their relationship with oil.

Three to read

Video of the day

Pong, with extra steps

Becoming more "human": Chinese humanoid robot plays tennis with real-time AI decisions - YouTube

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Scientists in China have developed a system to teach humanoid robots movements skills based on fragmentary human data. And they've used it to train an android to play tennis.

While the robot is yet to be a match against professional players, it still returned a 96.5% return rate in its best performance, according to the yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study.

Say it, said it

Word of the day

Metis — Greek for "wisdom," and the name of Zeus' first wife and advisor, who helped him escape from his father Cronus' stomach and whom he repaid by swallowing after learning she will bear a son mightier than him.

Metis, already pregnant with Athena, the goddess of wisdom, helped her daughter escape from Zeus through his forehead. Athena's birth is depicted in the marble sculptures of the Acropolis, a fragment of which has been found near the remains of a shipwreck at the bottom of the Aegean Sea.

Quote of the day

"Thermodynamics tells you what's possible and what's not possible if the laws of the universe are what we think they are. Until now, there's nobody in four centuries of science that has been able to show that the laws of thermodynamics [do not apply]."

Angel Cuesta Ciscar, a professor of electrochemistry and physical chemistry at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, on why it's unlikely that a "dark oxygen" discovery on the seafloor is even possible.

Fun and games

The archaeological community is once again locked into fierce debate over the timeline of the American continent's first settlement. But how much do you know about the first people to reach it? Test your knowledge with this quiz.

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Ben TurnerActing Trending News Editor

Ben Turner is a U.K. based writer and editor at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.

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