The Chiquihuite Cave, a Real Novelty? Observations about the Still-ignored South American Prehistory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recently reported discovery of cultural evidence at Chiquihuite Cave (Zacatecas, Mexico), produced by humans of at least 26,500 calendar years ago, is a major advance in research into early human occupations in the Americas. Thirteen of the 239 lithic artifacts recovered from the SC-C stratigraphic component, dated during and before the Last Glacial Maximum, are illustrated in Ardelean et al. (2020. “Evidence of Human Occupation in Mexico around the Last Glacial Maximum.” Nature 584: 87–92). Although waiting for more detailed technological studies, these types of artifacts have been reported in other sites, primarily in South America. The field evidence from sites predating the Last Glacial Maximum must now be included in all interpretations of the initial settlement of the Americas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".