New discoveries seem to confirm hypotheses put forth by those who believe the Americas were populated by humans long before the Clovis people, according to this article.
A team from Mexico has analyzed human artifacts at Chiquihuite Cave and concluded there were human beings living there 33,000 years ago: “Now, Ciprian Ardelean, from the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico, Tom Higham, from the University of Oxford, and colleagues have found evidence of human occupation stretching back far beyond that date (the date of the Clovis culture - my note), at the Chiquihuite site in the central-northern Mexican Highlands.”
The article doesn’t mention it, but I can tell Ciprian Ardelean is a Romanian fellow (or of Romanian origin).
Assuming this holds up if they find human remains it would be fascinating to analyze their DNA and find out if they are ancestral to native Indians. I will conjecture not. Or that it won’t hold up.
I got my degree in anthropology and my major professor always believed that 20,000 to 25,000 years ago was much more probable for the first people to arrive on the continent than Clovis, which at the time was the oldest dated.
The Clovis First hypothesis has been dead for quite some time, at least 20 years, perhaps more. But whenever a new pre-Clovis site is found, the press releases and news reports all emphasize how this new discovery is in big conflict with the established paradigm. Science is not immune to sensationalization.
The 30,000 years BP is extreme, but I’m pretty sure some other site suggested about the same age. Can’t remember which one though.
Is it possible and credible that maybe only a small group came this early, and didn’t establish themselves, so they died out and there was a long gap before the next group came?
I thought it might be Monte Verde, but Wikipedia says 18K BP for that. Possibly it was one of the Pedra Furada sites in Brazil. At any rate, Wikipedia has a list of pre-Clovis sites: