End of the Clovis people theory

In the New York Times there is a good summary of long illness and finally terminal coma of theory that the first Americans were the Clovis people, who theoretically travelled an ice-free corridor from Asia down into the Americas. The Clovis people had distinctive spear points, and were thought to have first come to the continent around 13,500 years ago.

But there has long been evidence that there were far older peoples who settled the Americas, perhaps as long ago as 20,000 years. The resistance to that idea is, I’m sure, partly based on academics’ general reluctance to change views that they have built lives and careers on for decades. But I think there is also a reluctance to see primitive people as naturally adventurous explorers who might very well take to the ocean and move along the coast or cross large bodies of water like the straights between Australia and Asia. I think that humans have always had those qualities, and produce geniuses every generation (whether the ideas of those geniuses “take” is another matter, but they are there).

So there is general agreement now that the Clovis peoples were not the first, and probably not even the second, culture to settle the Americas. I think there is some pretty intriguing evidence that there may have been an early immigration from Europe, too, although those European genes didn’t survive in the American population into the historic period.

Next up: could life on earth have been seeded from life on other planets, pieces of which travelled through space? Most experts say the odds are too slight, but the universe is a big place and it has been around a long time.

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