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An icy barrier up to 300 stories high — taller than any building on Earth — may have prevented the first people from entering the New World over the land bridge that once connected Asia with the Americas, a new study has found.These findings suggest that the first people in the Americas instead arrived via boats along the Pacific coast, researchers said...Based on stone tools dating back as much as 13,400 years, archaeologists had long suggested that people from the prehistoric culture known as the Clovis were the first to migrate from Asia to the Americas. Prior work regarding the...

Who are the first Americans? In the 1920s and 30s, discoveries made near Clovis, NM suggested a prehistoric Paleo-Indian culture that dates back nearly 13,200 years ago. But new evidence may actually point to Texas as a possible origin. Archaeologist Wilson W. "Dub" Crook has found that may just change the way we see history.

Prehistoric humans began gravitating to the Gault Site about 16,000 years ago, Texas State researchers say. The Gault Site is preserved forever because an archaeologist bought it and gave it to a conservation group... [Few academics have such wherewithal and fewer still would spend it this way, said Tom Dillehay, an anthropology professor at Vanderbilt University.] You can hardly walk 10 steps along Buttermilk Creek about 45 miles north of Austin without finding evidence that people lived here thousands of years ago. The ground is littered with flakes of chert, a plentiful stone from which projectile points, blades, cleavers and...

The stone tools discovered by the team were similar to what Dillehay had previously found at Monte Verde. Many were simple unifacial tools -- meaning they were worked on only one side of the stone, to create a sharp edge -- though some of the younger tools and projectile points indicate bifacial technologies... The bones tended to be small fragments, broken and scorched, indicating that the animals had been cooked. They often came from very large animals, like prehistoric llamas or mastodons, as well as smaller creatures like prehistoric deer and horses. The Monte Verde site was unlikely to have...

Skulls found in Mexico suggest the early Americans would have said 'G'day mate' By Steve Connor, Science Editor 04 September 2003 The accepted theory of how prehistoric humans first migrated to America has been challenged by a study of an ancient set of bones unearthed in Mexico. An analysis of 33 skulls found on the Mexican peninsula of Baja California suggests that the first Americans were not north Asians who crossed to the American continent about 12,000 years ago. The skulls more closely resemble the present-day natives of Australia and the South Pacific, suggesting that there might have been an...

US colonisation given new twist 05.09.2003 By STEVE CONNOR http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3521751&thesection=news&thesubsection=world The accepted theory of how prehistoric humans colonised America has been challenged by a study of bones unearthed in Mexico. An analysis of 33 skulls found on the Mexican peninsula of Baja California suggests that the first Americans did not migrate across the Bering Strait separating modern Russia and Alaska 12,000 years ago. The skulls more closely resemble the present-day native people of Australia and the South Pacific, suggesting that there might have been a much earlier colonisation of America via a different route. The research, published in the...

The 7,500- to 11,000-year-old remains suggest the oldest settlers of the Americas came from different genetic stock than more recent Native Americans. Modern Native Americans share traits with Mongoloid peoples of Mongolia, China, and Siberia, the researchers said. But they found dozens of skulls from Brazil appear much more similar to modern Australians, Melanesians, and Sub-Saharan Africans. A Brazilian study involving a large collection of South American skulls suggests at least two distinct groups of early humans colonized the Americas. Anthropologists Walter Neves and Mark Hubbe of the University of Sao Paulo studied 81 skulls of early humans and found...

Some people in the Brazilian Amazon are very distant relations of indigenous Australians, New Guineans and other Australasians, two groups of scientists who conducted detailed genetic analyses reported Tuesday. But the researchers disagree on the source of that ancestry. The connection is ancient, all agree, and attributable to Eurasian migrants to the Americas who had some Australasian ancestry, the scientists said. But one group said the evidence is clear that two different populations came from Siberia to settle the Americas 15,000 or more years ago. The other scientific team says there was only one founding population from which all indigenous...

Russian archaeologists have discovered the remains of the world's oldest known Arctic settlement - a Siberian riverfront site that they say could help determine when humans first arrived in the Americas. The 30,000-year-old site - twice as old as any previous Arctic dig - includes a rhinoceros bone shaped into a spear that shows a "striking resemblance" to spear points found by archaeologists in Clovis, N.M.

'First Americans' may be Johnnies-come-lately By MIKE TONER The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 08/20/04 Human history is being written —and rewritten — a shovelful at a time on a shaded hillside along the Savannah River. Each summer Al Goodyear's team of archaeologists digs deeper into the riverbank in South Carolina's Allendale County. Each summer the story of the first Americans, the primitive hunters who first populated the continent, grows longer. And more complex. And more controversial. David Tulis/AJC (ENLARGE) Archaeologist Al Goodyear holds a hand-made 'microblade,' one of the hundreds of artifacts unearthed during his team's seven years of excavations...

University of South Carolina archeologist Al Goodyear said he has uncovered a layer of charcoal from a possible hearth or fire pit at a site near the Savannah River. Samples from the layer have been laboratory-dated to more than 50,000 years old. Yet Goodyear stopped short of declaring it proof of the continent's earliest human occupation. "It does look like a hearth," he said, "and the material that was dated has been burned." ...Goodyear, who has worked the Topper site since 1981, discovered the charcoal layer in May.

Artifacts dated to 30,000 years ago tell of human resilience in an unforgiving environment, and they may provide new clues to the peopling of the Americas Primates are simply not primed for Arctic survival. A person lost on the tundra in winter will quickly perish, and even the sturdiest shelter atop the permafrost provides scant refuge without a supply of fuel. Yet somehow, at the height of the last Ice Age, humans endured a similarly unforgiving environment in northern Siberia, in the Yana River valley 500 kilometers above the Arctic Circle. That's the surprising conclusion from a trove of artifacts...

Fire Pit Dated to Be Over 50,000 Years Old Thu Nov 18,10:10 AM ET Top Stories - AP By AMY GEIER EDGAR, Associated Press Writer COLUMBIA, S.C. - In the growing debate about when people first appeared on this continent, a leading archaeologist said Wednesday he has discovered what could be sooty evidence of human occupation in North America tens of thousands of years earlier than is commonly believed.University of South Carolina archaeologist Al Goodyear said he has uncovered a layer of charcoal from a possible hearth or fire pit at a site near the Savannah River. Samples from the...

In an otherwise unremarkable gravel bluff on the banks of the Bow River in Calgary, University of Alberta researchers Jiri Chlachula and Alan Bryan believe they have unearthed the remains of what could be the oldest human artifacts in North America, the pair announced this month. If substantiated, the discovery pushes back the known date of human settlement in North America by several thousand years. Other earth scientists are sceptical about the find's authenticity: U of A geomorphologist Rob Young describes it as "based only on pure speculation." ...Comments Prof. Young: "Any dude could have put that rock there."

The First Americans By Sharon Begley and Andrew Murr Newsweek, April 26, 1999 New digs and old bones reveal an ancient land that was a mosaic of peoples—including Asians and Europeans. Now a debate rages: who got here first? 'Skull wars:' Facial reconstruction of the 'Spirit Cave Man,' based on bones found in Spirit Cave, Churchill County, Nevada (David Barry--Courtesy Nevada State Museum; facial reconstruction by Sharon Long) As he sat down to his last meal amid the cattails and sedges on the shore of the ancient lake, the frail man grimaced in agony. A fracture at his left temple...

<p>Eight anthropologists who want to study an ancient skeleton must want until a federal court has heard an appeal of the case by four Northwest tribes that consider the bones sacred.</p> <p>The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision, made last week, prevents any study of the 9,300-year-old skeleton known as Kennewick Man, which scientists have sought to examine since 1996.</p>

IBERIA, NOT SIBERIA?A Look at the Evidence Supporting a Late Pleistocene Migration to the New World from Europe Michael A. Arbuthnot ANT 5152 Paleoindian Archaeology Dr. Michael Faught December 6th, 2000 Perhaps the most provocative question facing North American paleo-archaeologists is the origin of the Clovis complex. Traditional models have placed Clovis origins in Asia, though one controversial theory contends that Clovis progenitors may have migrated from Iberia (Spain, France, and Portugal). This theory suggests that the descendants of an Upper Pleistocene culture known as Solutrean were the first unquestionable inhabitants of the New World. The recent revitalization of a...

Immigrants from the Other Side? According to the Clovis-First theory, for decades the gospel preached by authorities on the peopling of the Americas, the first Americans walked across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia about 12,000 years ago, and after finding a corridor through the Cordilleran Ice Sheet--admittedly it wasn't an easy trip and the timing was tricky--descended into temperate North America. We know them by their classic fluted points, unlike any others in the world, they left at campsites on their journey south to populate Central and South America. [~ 45:l ~] There have been variations of the basic...

Radiocarbon dating of charcoal found elsewhere on this site has suggested people might have camped here and built fires by the north branch of the Potomac River, anywhere from 9,000 years ago to as much as 16,000 years ago... Some tools and bones have been found in Pennsylvania and Virginia that date well before the Clovis era, although scientists debate whether the dating is accurate.

South Carolina dig could move habitation date back another 12,000 years.