Vero Man: The 1915-1916 Discovery — Vero Beach, Florida

Vero Man is the name attached to human bones that came out of a drainage canal bank in Vero Beach in October 1915, lying in the same bed as the bones of extinct Ice Age animals. According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, Frank Ayers found portions of a human skeleton in Stratum 2 in October 1915, and at that time these were the first well documented human remains from the Pleistocene of North America. The canal was one of the Indian River Farms Company drains, the cut known today as the Main Relief Canal, on the north side of Vero Beach near the airport.

The Vero remains were never one tidy skeleton. Vero News reported in January 2014, citing the Old Vero Ice Age Sites Committee, that human skeletal remains of five individuals were found mixed with those of extinct Ice Age mammals at the canal. A February 2015 NPR report added a correction from the modern dig team at Vero: what Sellards labeled skeleton two and skeleton three turned out to be one individual, the one now known as Vero Man. Vero News reported in October 2013 that the Vero fossil is now believed to be the bones of a female.

The discovery was a side effect of draining the Vero marshland for farms. The Indian River Guardian recounts that engineer R. D. Carter described the land west of the Indian River in 1913 as marsh as far as the eye could see, and that the canals dug for the Indian River Farms Company turned up the fossil remains of prehistoric animals. The Florida Museum says the Vero canal cut through a bone-bearing deposit that extended for more than 300 meters, though the layer was only a few meters thick.

The first finds came from local hands. In 1913, the Florida Museum reports, F. C. Gifford found the first fossils in the bank of the canal and gave them to Isaac M. Weills, who began collecting more with Frank Ayers and other Vero residents. Bones turned up on both banks of the canal and on both sides of the railroad crossing. Weills reported the find to Elias H. Sellards, the Florida state geologist, who visited with his assistant Herman Gunter. Collecting at Vero picked up sharply once Ayers uncovered the human bones in 1915.

The location is still identifiable. The Indian River Guardian placed it in January 2014 along the Main Relief Canal just north of County Administration Building B, and Vero News described it in October 2013 as the ground in the angle between U.S. 1 and Aviation Boulevard, on the canal bank behind the Indian River County offices.

Sellards argued that the people whose bones lay in the Vero canal bank had lived alongside the extinct animals buried with them. The Florida Museum lists his 1916 report in the Florida Geological Survey Annual Report, titled Human remains and associated fossils from the Pleistocene of Florida, and two 1917 papers titled On the association of human remains and extinct vertebrates at Vero, Florida, one in the American Journal of Science and one in The Journal of Geology. He also held an on-site conference at Vero with leading archaeologists of the day.

The claim reached far beyond Indian River County. NPR reported in 2015 that Sellards took the Vero finds as proof of people in Florida at least 14,000 years ago, when most scientists believed humans had been in the New World for no more than 6,000 years. The University of Utah Press calls the Vero argument the first serious challenge to the belief, widely accepted until the Folsom discoveries in 1926, that humans had not entered Florida before the present Holocene epoch. Sellards had chemistry on his side as well: an early geochemical test cited by the Florida Museum found the Vero human bones mineralized to the same degree as the Pleistocene megafauna.

Most archaeologists of the period did not believe the Vero human bones were of Pleistocene age, the Florida Museum states. The Indian River Guardian sums up the 1916 gathering at the canal: the experts Sellards invited accepted that the Vero fossils dated from the Ice Age, all except the human remains. NPR reported that an anthropologist from the Smithsonian led the attack on Sellards, and that Vero Man faded into an archaeological footnote for decades.

The heart of the quarrel was stratigraphy. Vero Beach 32963 explained in March 2014 that scientists disagreed over whether the Vero Man bones lay in the intact Ice Age layer or had been deliberately buried into it several thousand years later, and that the dispute was never resolved. Without a clean answer from the soil, the bones themselves were the only other witness, and they could not be dated by the methods of the time.

Field work at Vero ended within a few years. The Florida Museum dates the first excavation phase by Ayers, Weills and Sellards to 1913 through 1918. Sellards left Florida for Texas in 1919, and the Florida Geological Survey turned its attention elsewhere, which the museum attributes in part to the unfavorable reception his Vero work had received.

The human bones from Vero were scattered and partly compromised long before modern dating existed. Vero Beach 32963 reported in 2014 that the remains lumped together as Vero Man ended up coated in varnish or soaked in paraffin, so they could never be carbon-dated. Some of the dozens of human bones from the Vero Man site went to the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, while the only skull found is believed to be in a box somewhere in the Smithsonian, last seen in 1971, according to the site's lead archaeologist.

Animal specimens from the Vero canal took similar routes. The Florida Museum says some Vero fossils in the Florida Geological Survey collection were handed to the Smithsonian for safekeeping when Sellards departed, and that Weills's widow donated his whole collection to the survey in 1927. The split between Gainesville and Washington is one reason the Vero Man question stayed open for so long.

A century after Sellards, the question went back into the Vero ground. The Florida Museum wrote in 2015 that new geochemical analyses published in 2012 and controlled excavations in 2014 had shown Sellards correct about humans coexisting with extinct megafauna at the site. In June 2011 the Smithsonian said research on an engraved bone found near the Old Vero Site further validated his claims that people hunted animals at Vero Beach during the last Ice Age, claims disputed for 95 years.

The most recent published word on the human bones points the other way. In 2024 the University of Utah Press issued The Old Vero Site (8IR009): One Hundred Years Later, The 2014 to 2017 Excavations, by James M. Adovasio, C. Andrew Hemmings and F. J. Vento, the leaders of the modern Vero dig. The publisher's summary states that the book uses new data to conclude that Sellards's claims are not supported by the evidence and that the human remains at the site were intrusive from a later time horizon, as critics of the original Vero work had argued. The modern excavations themselves, and the separate Vero mammoth engraving, have their own Digital Towns pages.