When Were the Americas Populated?

evil agent passes along an article in Scientific American reporting that new radiocarbon dating techniques have cast doubt on the accepted story of how the Americas were populated. In the traditional view, "[M]igrants out of northeast Asia slipped into the Americas bearing finely shaped stone projectiles, so-called 'Clovis points,' after the town in New Mexico where they were first uncovered. This Clovis culture rapidly spread throughout the empty continents and by 1,000 years after their arrival had reached the southernmost tip of what is now South America, making them the original ancestors of indigenous Americans." The new dating of Clovis sites suggests that "Clovis" was not a people, but rather a technology. That is, a new and more efficient method of making arrowheads for hunting spread rapidly through a pre-existing population in both North and South America, over at most 350 years.

Comments

Nexessity is the mother of invention.

[Scrameustache]

The thing I find odd is that most of the advanced civilizations were in Mexico and S. America, rather than from the North. If the first humans came from the north through asia, then the first people were nomads, with a lifestyle that is still surviving in remote parts of asia (mongols still ride and herd semi-tamed horses, people in siberia still stalk deer herds). These people found massive herds in north america, and they came from people who had been hunting from massive heards for thousands of years, so they kept doing what worked. The beasts looked a little different, but they gave Perfectly Normal Meat.
Being nomads, these people spread down south, where there were deserts and mountains and jungles, but no great herds, so they had a choice: improvise, or walk all the way back to where it was cold and women covered themselves non-stop in great leather coats with the fur on the inside.
In the south, it was warm, and boobies were flying freely... so the paleogeeks did their thing. To advance civilization, of course.