BATON ROUGE - Amid one scientist's claims that the LSU mounds are some of the oldest man-made structures in the Americas, some of his university colleagues have challenged that claim, according to The Advocate. 

LSU geology professor Emeritus Ellwood published his decades of research in the American Journal of Science concluding that the mounds were at least 4,000 years older than the Great Pyramids in Egypt, making them one of the oldest structures in the Americas and in the world.

In response, a group of LSU archaeologists and Louisiana state archaeologist Chip McGimsey wrote their own paper based on separate research and published it in the magazine for the Society of American Archaeology. 

“Professor Ellwood and his colleagues are arguing for something on the order of 5,000 years older than some of the earliest claims," a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, T.R. Kidder, told The Advocate. "It really is an exceptional claim.”

McGimsey and the archaeologists' paper argues the mounds are closer to 5,000 to 7,000 years old rather than 11,000 as Ellwood claims.

"They weren't just wandering around the landscape, even the paleo-indians, these early Ice Age people," said Heather McKillop, a professor with the LSU Department of Geography and Anthropology. "[Ellwood] is claiming that the mounds date to that time period, the time of paleo-indians and the time when people were hunting Ice Age animals. That just doesn't fit with anything we know, and we know a lot, about the lifestyle of these archaic people."

“We’re not questioning the dates but we’re questioning the interpretation and the lack of inclusion of other datasets," McGimsey said in a press release. "This disagreement in no way detracts from the significance and importance of the LSU Campus Mounds.

"While we would argue they are not the oldest person-made earthworks in North America, they are still some of the very oldest and part of what is a remarkable history of mound-building in North America that has its origins here in Louisiana. The LSU Campus Mounds are part of that tradition."

McGimsey told The Advocate he hopes the research conducted by Ellwood brings in more archaeologists and researchers from around the world to study the mounds and help nail down their age while opening up more information to the world on the lifestyle of indigenous tribes in the archaic period.