“wiped out the mammoths and mastodons, prompted the last ice age and decimated the first human culture in North America about 12,900 years ago.”
an aspect of this I haven’t seen spelled out in any arcticle is the implication that the paleo-indians were able to expand without any traces of other cultures/genetics being assimilated because the preceding cultures were dead or otherwise severely depleted, numbers-wise.
In fact the theorized event may have enabled paleo-indian expansion in the first place.
You mean something like this:
"The oldest human remains found in the Americas were recently "discovered" in the storeroom of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Found in central Mexico in 1959, the five skulls were radiocarbon dated by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Mexico and found to be 13,000 years old. They pre-date the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years, adding to the growing evidence against the Clovis-first model for the first peopling of the Americas."
"Of additional significance is the shape of the skulls, which are described as long and narrow, very unlike those of modern Native Americans.