---
title: "Chilean Archaeologists Find 12,500-Year-Old Skull That May Bear Human Butchery Marks"
description: "Researchers say the gomphothere’s broken skull may show early people reached its brain, though radiocarbon dates are pending"
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-09-30T21:02:54Z
modified: 2026-10-01T04:56:49Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/chilean-archaeologists-find-12-500-year-old-skull-that-may-b-043065
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "megafauna", "chile", "tagua-tagua", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Chilean Archaeologists Find 12,500-Year-Old Skull That May Bear Human Butchery Marks

*Researchers say the gomphothere’s broken skull may show early people reached its brain, though radiocarbon dates are pending*

By rews desk · September 30, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/chilean-archaeologists-find-12-500-year-old-skull-that-may-b-043065

## In brief

- Archaeologists found much of a 12,500-year-old gomphothere skeleton at the former Tagua Tagua lake in central Chile
- The animal’s fractured skull may show people opened it to reach the brain, according to the university
- The dig, led by Rafael Labarca, ran Aug. 31 to Sept. 14; radiocarbon dates from the find are still pending
- Horse remains, burned bird bones and stone tools were found alongside the skeleton
- Three neighboring sites suggest groups returned to the lake shore repeatedly at the Pleistocene’s end

Archaeologists on the shore of an ancient lake in central Chile have recovered the fractured skull of a 12,500-year-old gomphothere, one that may have been broken open by some of the region’s earliest people, they said on Wednesday.

The excavation, led by Rafael Labarca of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, ran from Aug. 31 to Sept. 14 on the former bed of Tagua Tagua lake in the O’Higgins Region. Gomphotheres were massive herbivores, distant relatives of elephants that once ranged across Chile. This one was an adult, its bones unusually well preserved, along with much of the rest of its skeleton.

The skull drew most of the attention. It was fractured in a way that may show people opened it deliberately to reach the brain, a dense source of fat worth eating, according to the university.

That reading is not yet confirmed. The team has no consolidated radiocarbon dates from the new remains. The age of roughly 12,500 years rests for now on the archaeological context, and the researchers currently place human activity on this stretch of shore between about 12,600 and 12,400 years ago.

The skeleton turned up opposite a sector first excavated by the archaeologist Julio Montané in 1967, a hint that the site spreads farther along the shore than was thought. The gomphothere was not alone in the ground either: the digs also produced horse remains, large quantities of burned bird bones and stone tools.

The association shows human groups exploited several kinds of animals around Tagua Tagua, Mr. Labarca said. They were not camped beside the lake living off one spectacular species. They worked a varied lakeside system rich in birds, mammals and other resources, and the site can show how they moved through the land, chose what to take and kept coming back over generations.

Work in the area began in 2023 with a spread of test pits, each a meter square. Two yielded extinct animals together with stone artifacts, and the team returned with larger digs in 2025 and again this year.

The current excavation joins a cluster of sites known as Tagua Tagua 1, Tagua Tagua 3 and Tagua Tagua 1 Oriente. Together they suggest people never settled the shore for good. Groups appear to have visited intermittently through the final millennia of the Pleistocene, returning whenever the lake paid off.

In life, the gomphothere would have stood several meters tall and weighed several tons, feeding on grasses, leaves and bark. Evidence from Chile already links people to these animals before they died out near the end of the Pleistocene, which is what gives Tagua Tagua, preserving both megafauna and the traces of the humans who lived alongside them, its weight in the archaeology of South America.

The broader goal is to reconstruct the ancient shoreline itself and to track how human use of it changed across hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. If the team’s reading of the skull holds up under further analysis, the fractures would preserve the moment people processed one of the heaviest animals in their world for food. The radiocarbon results, still to come, will say when.