A couple years ago, there was a report about ancient footprints found in New Mexico were dated to about 22-23,000 years ago. Here’s an update by the same people:
Anyway, there was some doubt about the dating used in that earlier study. Someone suggested that fossil water may have messed up the carbon dating. So they went back and did some more work and now have two independent forms of dating that agree that they are about 23K years old. I doubt this will convince everyone. This topic always has someone who has other ideas and don’t want them disturbed, so they’ll look hard find something that may be an issue.
I couldn’t find a thread that only discusses when America was first peopled, but that may be a failure on my part. I know we’ve discussed this many times before. Here’s a thread that discusses all kinds of “discovery” of America, including when the Indians first came along.
It isn’t all that unlikely that several small groups of hominids found their way to the Western Hemisphere millennia before the ancestors of modern indigenous people did.
Can it, Fudd! We were asking who got there first. The fact that the first groups who made it may have fizzled out, with long gaps between them and whoever came next, in not a consideration here. Would not surprise anyone if indeed this happened a lot! Yeah, so let’s focus on what matters here - bragging rights!
Footprints in New Mexico are a good sign that the people who made them were not going to fizzle out. NM is a long way from the ice-free corridor and from the ocean, the two possible paths for people get to America. In order for there to be that many people in NM, there’d definitely be a lot of other people elsewhere. Too many to fizzle.
ETA: Actually, the ice-free corridor would not be an issue here. At 23,000 years ago, it was still several thousand years in the future.