Already throughout the 1960s, Cruxent's reports on his finds at Muaco, the Pedregal Valley and Taima-taima had stirred controversy. The conventional wisdom, especially among North American archaeologists, was that the first South Americans were the result of a very rapid migration from North America, following big game, and a tool tradition highlighted by the use of a projectile point (spear) technology. In North America, the accepted earliest evidence was tied to the Clovis fluted projectile point technology, dated to no earlier than 11,000 years B.P. It was then argued that the earliest migrants to colonize South America would have a Clovis-derived tool technology and that it would have to post-date 11,000 B.P. The initial radiocarbon dates obtained from Taima-taima (and Muaco), however, were several millennia earlier than any accepted dates from Clovis sites in North America...
An El Jobo projectile point rests next to the tibia of an Haplomastodon at Taima-taima.