Interesting, but remember this article is a press release, not a peer reviewed scientific paper. Lots of hoops to jump through before this will be recognized within the field and some of their colleagues will continue to insist that there were no people in the Americas prior to Clovis.
I think that the evidence is becoming pretty convincing. I’m backing Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian in this sweepstakes. The First Americans crossed the Atlantic and or the Bering Sea/Pacific following the ice verges and preceded the ice free corridor Asians by several thousands of years.
If there was a migration through an ice free corridor, the ice margins folks came first.
There was a lot of movement of people along the shores of asia 50,000-60,000 years ago. Those are roughly the dates that the aborigines are said to have arrived in Australia—followed —over the next 10k years — by the decline and extinction of megafauna in Australia.
Hard not to believe that people stopped walking and boating along the shores of oceans.
One of the characteristics of the last couple 1000 years was the development of cross ocean sailing. In geologic time —the Europeans arrived in Hawaii at almost the same time as the polanesians. They were both able to do so because they had both learned cross ocean sailing.
In deeper time, near shore boating has been around for much longer. Hard to say how long.
So imho its not beyond the pale to think that 30k years ago—people may have walked across the bearing land bridge. But later migrations may have boated along the shore.
The dating arguement won’t come as a result of the results from one site in Mexico or another site in south america— but rather a number of discoveries that point to the earlier dates for first migrations from asia.
nor are the arguements that the clovis people were from Europe mooted. Rather the genetic and tool evidence points to them being from Europe—ie the solutreans. however, the genetic evidence suggests were likely a central or northern asian people.