[tree_enjoyer]

>The 3,500-year-old city, named Peñico, is believed to have served as a key trading hub connecting early Pacific coast communities with those living in the Andes mountains and Amazon basin.

...

>Researchers say the discovery sheds light on what became of the Americas' oldest civilisation, the Caral.

Oldest civilization is a bit of a stretch. Earliest surviving structures is a stretch, but it's one we know about, so I guess they have to base it off that. More and more evidence is showing that humans were in the Americas farther back in time. While they weren't the builders of of fine stonework and megalithic structures like the Olmec (that we know of), there were certainly civilizations and cities before humans suddenly started building the massive pyramids and cities we have uncovered so far. There's a lot of secrets still hidden in the South American jungles.

[TSiege]

This site (~1475 BCE) is older than the Olmecs (1200-400BCE) and is associated with another city, Caral, which is even older than them (3000-1800BCE) and both are much farther south than Mexico is compared to the Bering Land Bridge.

Caral at 5000 years old is quite old! For additional context the Pyramids of Giza are ~4600 years old and Stonehenge is ~5100 years old. Given that it's in Peru this does not counter your narrative. But Archaeology is a Science and they cannot definitively say there is an older city without discovering it. It also might be unlikely to find what would be qualified as a "City" that is older. We've certainly found much older human settlements in the Americas, but megalithic building and cities is harder to say. Perhaps we'll find packed earth ones somewhere, but Peru really did have the jump on what would term "complex societies" in the Americas

[dmix]

> Complex society in the Caral–Supe arose a millennium after Sumer in Mesopotamia, was contemporaneous with the Egyptian pyramids, and predated the Mesoamerican Olmecs by nearly two millennia.

[MangoToupe]

> Archaeology is a Science

Archaeology is a collection of arbitrary-but-largely-agreed-upon definitions. That doesn't make it a science. The entire focus on whether or not this is a civilization (or indeed why such a determination matters) is a great example of why you should abandon consensus at the door.

[throwup238]

Remember these are archaeologists using the word "civilization" as a term of art within their field. There's no universally agreed upon definition but in general people use the scale model [1] (you can see the scales that different authors have developed at the link).

It's not like we don't know about a bunch of different peoples that existed even earlier (i.e. Toca da Tira Peia is ~22 kYa), but the evidence we have of them is basically a few burial mounds and maybe some domestic structures, and that does not rise to the threshold of a civilization for the intents and purposes of archaeology.

[1] https://www.sociostudies.org/journal/articles/140526/

[ErigmolCt]

I think we're still just scratching the surface of pre-Columbian history

[Oarch]

City is also a bit of a stretch.

[varjag]

Capital masonry structures including temples and possibly pools/water communal reservoirs? Yeah no it's a city, as much as it was as thing 5k years ago.

[ricksunny]

In context of possible early Peruvian civilizations, definitely don't read the below; it's obviously an undersubstantiated pseudoscientific rabbit-hole not worth your curiosity and that your productive workday can not afford.

https://tridactyls.org/

(maintained by one Gonzalo Chavez https://x.com/gchavez101 )

[TSiege]

This is pseudoscience nonsense spread by some huckster and it's not worth anyones time and is disrespectful to the people of Peru. It's a modern hoax

> "They're not extraterrestrials. They're dolls made from animal bones from this planet joined together with modern synthetic glue," said Flavio Estrada, an archeologist with Peru's Institute for Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences. "It's totally a made-up story," Estrada added.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/scientists-assert-ali...

[mistrial9]

on the other hand, I enjoyed "The Lost World" adventure fantasy book quite a lot as a kid, and now it seems there is science for certain dinosaur era creatures in some places.. so maybe fantastic nonsense has a place in a spectrum, as long as it is identified as "speculative" or whatever