In November 1992, fossil monitor Richard Cerutti spotted bones exposed by highway construction along State Route 54 near the boundary of San Diego and National City, California. The animal proved to be a mastodon. But as the San Diego Natural History Museum team excavated, the deposit appeared unusual: major limb bones were sharply broken, some fragile elements survived, five large cobbles lay in fine sediment, stone fragments refitted, and one tusk stood nearly vertical.
More than two decades later, uranium-thorium modeling of mastodon bone produced a preferred age estimate of about 130,700 years. In a 2017 Nature paper, Steven Holen, Thomas Deméré, Daniel Fisher and colleagues argued that an unidentified member of Homo had used the cobbles as hammerstones and anvils to break fresh mastodon bones, perhaps for marrow or bone-tool material.
The claim remains deeply contested. Critics point to construction disturbance, possible geological and biological site-formation processes, the difficulty of identifying human action from broken bone and battered stone, and the absence of human remains, hearths, conventional stone tools, or comparable sites from the following one hundred thousand years. Defenders answer that mineral coatings show important fractures are ancient, that the sediment does not easily explain the large cobbles, and that later microscopy found bone residues concentrated on worn cobble surfaces.
The mastodon is old. The unresolved question is whether anyone picked up the stones beside it.
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YES OR NO: Do you believe Cerutti challenges the accepted timeline of peopling in the Americas???????
