Bone jewelry means humans were in the Americas *before* the Bering Land Bridge.

IFLScience reports on some stylish, retro bangles coming from a Brazilian designer that are taking the world by storm … because they were made from giant sloth bones about 25,000 years ago, long before humans could have traveled on foot through what is now the Aleutians:

The artifacts were discovered at the Santa Elina rock shelter in Central Brazil, known for its beautiful collection of rock art. Among the relics discovered in the cave, researchers have identified remains of the extinct giant ground sloth, including thousands of osteoderms, the hard bony deposits that form an armor-like layer on the skin of certain animals.

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This provides further good evidence that humans were wandering around the Americas at the same time as the extinct giant ground sloth (Glossotherium phoenesis). These colossal beasts were almost the size of an elephant, measuring up to 4 meters (13.1 feet) in length and possibly weighing up to 1,500 kilograms (3,306 pounds). Like many other megafauna of the Pleistocene, it looks like they were widely hunted by humans despite their impressive stature.

Furthermore, 25,000-year-old evidence of humans in the Americas is remarkably old. Until recently, the commonly held view among researchers was that the earliest inhabitants in the Americas were a single group known as the “Clovis culture” that settled in the continent around 15,000-13,000 years ago after crossing from Eurasia. However, that date has been continually pushed back by a number of archaeological finds in the past few decades.


You can read more about the discovery here, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.