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

Vero Man is the name attached to human bones that came out of a drainage canal bank at Vero 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 had been dug by the Indian River Farms Company, and the museum locates the fossil site in Vero Beach, Indian River County, southeast of the Vero Beach municipal airport.

The Vero remains were more than one skeleton. The museum's May 3, 2012 study announcement says two nearly complete human skeletons were discovered at the Vero Beach site, and that its researchers analyzed samples from 24 human bones and 48 animal fossils in the museum's collections. The same release says the Vero site is, in Barbara Purdy's words, still the only site where there was an abundance of actual human bones, not just artifacts, associated with the animals.

The fossils surfaced when an Indian River Farms Company drainage canal at Vero cut through a bone-bearing deposit.

The Florida Museum says the Vero canal cut through a deposit that extended for over 300 meters, though it is only a few meters thick. The museum credits F. C. Gifford with the first canal bank fossils, in 1913; he passed them to Isaac M. Weills, who began to collect more with Frank Ayers and other local residents. Fossils were found on the banks of both sides of the Vero canal and both east and west of the railroad track crossing it. Weills reported the discovery to Florida state geologist Elias H. Sellards, who visited with his assistant Herman Gunter. Collecting efforts increased significantly after Ayers found the human bones in 1915.

The Florida Museum gives the Vero locality's coordinates as 27.65 degrees north and 80.40 degrees west. Anyone hoping to collect or dig there needs the City of Vero Beach's authorization first, the museum says.

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. The U.S. Geological Survey publications record also lists a 1916 Sellards article in Science, Human remains from the Pleistocene of Florida. He held an on-site conference at Vero with leading archaeologists of the day.

The claim reached far beyond Indian River County. The University of Utah Press says the Vero argument was the first serious challenge to the idea that people had not reached Florida before the Holocene, an idea widely held until the Folsom discoveries of 1926. Sellards had chemistry on his side as well: an early geochemical analysis cited by the Florida Museum showed the Vero human bones mineralized to the same degree as those of Pleistocene megafauna.

Most archaeologists of the period did not believe the Vero human bones were of Pleistocene age, the Florida Museum states.

The heart of the quarrel was whether the people and the animals at Vero were the same age. The 2012 Florida Museum release says that after the Vero Beach fossils were found between 1913 and 1916, some prominent scientists convinced researchers the human skeletons were from more recent burials and not as old as the animals, a question that remained unanswered because no dating methods existed.

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

The Vero human bones sampled in 2012 are in the Florida Museum's collections in Gainesville, and some early Vero fossils went to the Smithsonian.

The 2012 release says researchers analyzed samples from 24 human bones and 48 animal fossils in the Florida Museum's collections. Instead of radiocarbon dating, which requires collagen, they compared rare earth elements, because a lack of collagen in the Vero Beach specimens made radiocarbon dating impossible, Purdy said.

Animal specimens from the Vero canal took several routes. The Florida Museum says some Vero specimens in the Florida Geological Survey collection were turned over to the Smithsonian for safekeeping when Sellards departed, although the survey kept the holotype skull of Tapirus veroensis and the holotype skull of Canis ayersi, now Canis dirus. Weills' widow donated his entire fossil collection to the survey in 1927, and about 350 identifiable specimens were collected in this first phase. UF graduate student Robert Weigel excavated on the north side of the canal in 1956 and 1957, recovering about 1,100 identifiable specimens and some worked flint but no human fossils in Stratum 2.

Official and scholarly sources disagree on whether Sellards was right about Vero Man.

The Florida Museum wrote in 2015 that new geochemical analyses published in 2012 and detailed excavations by a modern archaeological field crew in 2014 had shown Sellards correct about humans coexisting with extinct megafauna at the Vero site. The 2012 rare earth study found the human and animal samples were all from the late Pleistocene, about 13,000 years ago, though University of Cincinnati researcher Kenneth Tankersley noted it did not provide an absolute date. The museum says the 2014 Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute crew led by C. Andrew Hemmings found undisturbed strata near Sellards' original area, with ancient soil layers dated to about 8, 12 and 19 thousand years before present. 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 over the past 95 years.

The most recent published word on the human bones points the other way. A 2024 University of Utah Press volume on the 2014 to 2017 re-excavation, written by Adovasio, Hemmings and Vento, reaches the opposite verdict: according to the publisher, its new data show Sellards' claims are not supported and the Vero human remains were intrusive from a later time horizon, the position his early critics had taken. The two positions are stated here as their sources give them. The modern excavations and the separate Vero mammoth engraving have their own Digital Towns pages.

Last verified: October 15, 2026, with fresh reads of the Florida Museum's Vero Canal Site entry and its May 2012 study release, the University of Utah Press listing, the 2011 Smithsonian Insider release and the USGS record of Sellards' 1916 Science article.