Post #783706 by EnchantedTikiGoth on Tue, Feb 6, 2018 10:36 PM

On 2018-02-05 20:34, Prikli Pear wrote:
The Clovis culture was long accepted as the oldest homo sapiens presence in North America, and is still taught as such in many textbooks. But the Gault site less than 90 miles away from me is turning up artifacts far older and pushing human habitation of the New World back tens of thousands of years.

At the risk of derailing, "Clovis first" hasn't been the model for about a decade... So much so that I don't even MENTION the "Clovis first" theory in the book I'm writing about the Ice Age :)

As you say, the evidence will out, and there is sufficient evidence at this point to show that while Clovis may be the first coherent culture to develop in the New World, they weren't the first people. The Gault site pushes evidence of human occupation back about 3000 years before Clovis, not tens of thousands. That is pretty consistent with the rest of the evidence for early habitation, which MAY push things back as far as 19,000 years. One could argue that humans migrated into North America during a warm period around 30,000 years ago, but there is no evidence to support that argument at present. What has emerged as the new standard model is that around 18,000-20,0000 years ago or so, people traveled down the coast of British Columbia, either by boat or hopping between unglaciated refugia, entered through the Pacific Northwest, and spread out from there.