Stone artifacts hint that humans reached the Americas surprisingly early
Humans may have arrived in North America way earlier than archaeologists thought. Stone tools unearthed in a cave in Mexico indicate that humans could have lived in the area as early as about 33,000 years ago, researchers report online July 22 in Nature. That’s more than 10,000 years before humans are generally thought to have settled North America. This controversial discovery enters a new piece of evidence into the fierce debate about when and how the Americas were first populated. “A paper like this one is really stirring up the pot,” says coauthor Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge. It “will no doubt get a lot of arguments going.” For decades, archaeologists thought the Americas’ first residents were the Clovis people — big game hunters known for their well-crafted spearpoints who crossed a land bridge from Asia to Alaska about 13,000 years ago (SN: 8/8/18). Recent, well-accepted archaeological discoveries...