# Humans in North America **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 5, 2006, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140 "2006-11-05T01:26:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/1 "2006-11-05T01:26:25Z")
I’m getting ready to fire up the Bricker Time SUV and head back to a more peaceful, undeveloped time – North America before Jamestown, before Eric the Red, before all of that. But I would like to be able to find some to play gin rummy with every now and then, so I wouldn’t want to go so far back in time that humans haven’t made it over here at all. How far back do I have to go in order to be able to set up a “Welcome to What Will Be Kansas” sign and hand out complimentary baskets to the first arriving wandering hunter-gatherer homo sapiens? ---
**Author:** ![TimeWinder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bcef8e/32.png) [@TimeWinder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TimeWinder)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/2 "2006-11-05T02:22:21Z")
Interestingly, there’s a great deal of debate over this (and I’m not counting the creationist “they’ve always been here” argument). I think it’s pretty much agreed that humans were here 14 thousand years ago, mostly on the coasts. Once you start getting older than that, you’ll find folks on both sides; some claiming that 12-15 thousand years was the first of them, others 30-50 thousand, and I’ve even heard claims of 100K+, although I think that position is a bit of a fringe argument. Jared Diamond states in “What We Believe But Cannot Prove,” that the evidence for people in the Americas more than 14K years ago is very weak, and that he doesn’t think it will ever be shown that they were here before then. I’m writing a novel (isn’t everyone?) based on time travelers messing with history 12 thousand years ago, so if you do make the trip, come talk to me when you get back and I’ll change it to a documentary. ---
**Author:** ![Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tapioca_Dextrin)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/3 "2006-11-05T02:36:36Z")
The first Americans are generally thought to be from the [Clovis culture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture'), dating back about 13,500 years. There have been claims of a [pre Clovis culture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topper_%28archaeological_site%29) reaching back up to 50,000 years. It is unclear if the pre Clovis culture was familiar with gin rummy. ---
**Author:** ![Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tapioca_Dextrin)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/4 "2006-11-05T02:38:13Z")
[QUOTE=Tapioca Dextrin] The first Americans are generally thought to be from the [Clovis culture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture'), dating back about 13,500 years. There have been claims of a [pre Clovis culture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topper_%28archaeological_site%29) reaching back up to 50,000 years. It is unclear if the pre Clovis culture was familiar with gin rummy. [/QUOTE] That was impressive misuse of coding, it should read The first Americans are generally thought to be from the [Clovis culture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture), dating back about 13,500 years. There have been claims of a [pre Clovis culture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topper_%28archaeological_site%29) reaching back up to 50,000 years. :smack: ---
**Author:** ![Oslo\_Ostragoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/a9a28c/32.png) [@Oslo\_Ostragoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Oslo_Ostragoth)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/5 "2006-11-05T05:17:48Z")
History Channel or Discovery Channel had a show on this recently. Point being that the first Americans may well have been Europeans. I don’t recall the timeline, but it may have been up to 50,000 years ago. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/6 "2006-11-05T05:31:36Z")
Europeans? How were Europeans crossing the Atlantic 50000 years ago? The first people in America almost certainly traveled from Siberia to Alaska. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/7 "2006-11-05T05:34:46Z")
Kansas? Hmm, my WAG would be a nice even 10,000 years. As far as seeing the first humans in NA, I think that **TimeWinder** and **Tapioca Dextrin** ’s figures of c. 14,000 years seems about the consensus. ---
**Author:** ![Waenara](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/50afbb/32.png) [@Waenara](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Waenara)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 5:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/8 "2006-11-05T05:54:08Z")
[QUOTE=Little Nemo] Europeans? How were Europeans crossing the Atlantic 50000 years ago? The first people in America almost certainly traveled from Siberia to Alaska. [/QUOTE] From the Wikipedia article on the Clovis culture that **Tapioca Dextrin** linked to: > [@](#): > > **Solutrean hypothesis** > Another controversial hypothesis proposed in 1999 by Smithsonian archaeologist Dennis Stanford and colleague Bruce Bradley (Stanford and Bradley 2002), suggests that the Clovis people were descended from the Solutrean people who lived in southern Europe between about 21,000-17,000 years ago, and who created the first Stone Age artwork in present-day southern France. The link is suggested by the similarity in technology between the spear points of the Solutreans and those of the Clovis people. \*\*Such a theory would require that the Solutreans crossed via the edge of the pack ice in the North Atlantic Ocean that then extended to the Atlantic coast of France. They could have done this using survival skills similar to those of the modern Inuit people. \*\* I’ve never heard of this hypothesis before, but it’s interesting. Given the nature of Wikipedia, I’m not sure how seriously most researchers would take this hypothesis. ---
**Author:** ![Lust4Life](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ecc23a/32.png) [@Lust4Life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lust4Life)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 9:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/9 "2006-11-05T09:43:16Z")
[QUOTE=Little Nemo] Europeans? How were Europeans crossing the Atlantic 50000 years ago? The first people in America almost certainly traveled from Siberia to Alaska. [/QUOTE] The Discovery programme postulated that pre-clovis man came from what is now France based on the similarity of artifacts found in both areas and that as there was plenty of floating ice in the Atlantic( it being during the Ice Age) so that the nomads “berg hopped” and survived on sea life.The flaw I see in that theory is not allowing for the epossibility of of seperate but replicated invention. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/10 "2006-11-05T14:04:21Z")
After posting this thread and reading up on responses, I found [this site](http://www.mexicanfootprints.co.uk/), which says: “The discovery of 40,000 years old human footprints in Central Mexico challenges accepted theories on when and how humans first colonised the Americas.” ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/11 "2006-11-05T17:29:21Z")
Evidence for the Clovis culture is extensive and able to be radio-dated. There are a number of sites thought, on reasonable grounds, to predate the Clovis people, but for one reason or another they are not easily verifiable as to dates. Two such sites are in western Pennsylvania not far from metropolitan Pittsburgh and on Santa Catalina Island off the Los Angeles, California coast. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/12 "2006-11-05T17:49:14Z")
[1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann](http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X) has a good chapter in it summarizing the current state of the controversy over the origins of humanity in the Americas. He’s pretty conservative, though, and gives little attention to the older claims. Properly so, I think, since the evidence for the oldest claims is spotty and requires a lot of extrapolation. We’re in a period of “I don’t know” right now. Wait another decade and some of the evidence will be better understood. The notion of European colonization mentioned by **Waenara** is pretty well discredited today but again who knows what the future will say. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2006, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/13 "2006-11-05T18:32:57Z")
[QUOTE=Lust4Life] The Discovery programme postulated that pre-clovis man came from what is now France based on the similarity of artifacts found in both areas and that as there was plenty of floating ice in the Atlantic( it being during the Ice Age) so that the nomads “berg hopped” and survived on sea life.The flaw I see in that theory is not allowing for the epossibility of of seperate but replicated invention. [/QUOTE] This is pure conjecture and not generally accepted in the scientific community. Probably the best documented and most accepted pre-Clovis site is [Monte Verde](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde) in Chile, dated at 12,500 years BP. Claims that humans were in The Americas 20k, 30k, or 40k years ago are not substantiated. They may be at some point, but not now. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2006, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/humans-in-north-america/379140/14 "2006-11-06T02:37:40Z")
[QUOTE=John Mace] This is pure conjecture and not generally accepted in the scientific community. Probably the best documented and most accepted pre-Clovis site is [Monte Verde](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde) in Chile, dated at 12,500 years BP. Claims that humans were in The Americas 20k, 30k, or 40k years ago are not substantiated. They may be at some point, but not now. [/QUOTE] Correct. Monte Verde is now accepted by most archaeologists, though there are still a few holdouts. With that early a date for a site so far south, many archaeologists now assume dates of 14,000-15,000 BP for the first entry into the Americas. Anything much earlier than that is still highly controversial.