by Roy C Dudgeon

Created on: January 05, 2008   Last Updated: March 10, 2009

Current Data Concerning the Settlement of the Americas:

I often introduce my lectures on this topic by having my students read an article I lifted from the Internet from a site called "LiveScience" with the provocative title, "First Americans May Have Been European" (Carey 2006). It's such an excellent example of the manner in which journalists, and non-scientists generally, will latch on to a completely absurd hypothesis without a shred of evidence behind it and claim it throws doubt upon decades of careful empirical research.

In this article it is claimed that an "archaeologist" named Dennis Stanford, supposedly of the Smithsonian Institution, has argued that the original North American settlers could not possibly have come from Northeast Asia, which has been the accepted theory for decades. The only reason given is that the early North American Clovis tool complex does not look like tools from Siberia, but rather look more like the Solutrean tool tradition from Europe. From this single observation he then purportedly claims, against all evidence and reason, that the first settlers of the Americas must also have come from Europe.

After we all have a good chuckle concerning pseudo-science, and I refresh their memories concerning the nature of empirical evidence, I then proceed with my lecture.

In fact, there is little controversy in the archaeological literature over the question of where the first Americans came from. All the evidence points to northeastern Asia, as shall be discussed below. The only questions concern the matter surround the precise timing of the migration and the manner in which it was achieved.

It was long thought that the earliest settling of the Americas took place roughly 13,000-12,000 ya, but many now suggest that it could have taken place much earlier.

To begin with how people arrived here, however, one possibility is that people may have walked into North America from northeastern Asia. During glacial maxima, when sea levels dropped as much as 125 meters, a vast land area as much as 1500 kilometers across was exposed which linked Asia and North America. This "land bridge," called Beringia, is known to have been exposed intermittently between 75,000-35,000 ya (Hopkins 1982) and pretty much continuously between 35,000-11,000 ya (Yokohama et al. 2000), when the current interglacial began.

During these periods both people and animals could have migrated to North America on foot, and of course, that migration may not have been intentional. Hunters

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