American Archaeology updating. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...ily_2017-05-24&et_rid=41087911&et_cid=1345339 The evidence of early human occupation stunned Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who led the new study. Initially, he was interested in examining the mound itself. But geologists on his team wanted to study the landform under the mound, so “we just kept going down,” he says. The deepest pit, which took 5 years to excavate, reached down 31 meters. Shockingly, those deep layers contained telltale signs of human occupation, Dillehay’s team reports today in Science Advances: evidence of hearth fires, animal bones, plant remains, and simple but unmistakable stone tools. Radiocarbon dates from charcoal place the earliest human occupation at nearly 15,000 years ago. That’s made some researchers say Huaca Prieta should join the small but growing list of pre-14,000-year-old sites that have revolutionized scientists’ vision of the earliest Americans. Archaeologists used to think that people walked from Siberia through an ice-free passage down Alaska and Canada, reaching the interior of the United States about 13,000 years ago. In recent years, however, well documented earlier sites like Chile’s Monte Verde have convinced most archaeologists that humans made it deep into the Americas by 14,500 years ago, meaning that they would have had to cross Canada long before an ice-free corridor existed. That would have left them with one logical route into the Americas: down the Pacific coast. But direct evidence for such a migration is lacking.
I'm increasingly inclined to think that anatomically modern humans, and conceivably Denisovans or Homo erectus before them, entered the Americas on multiple occasions. Many seem to have arrived towards the end of the last ice age. (The Eskimos, Aleuts and maybe the Na-Dene speakers.) But others may have arrived around the beginning of that last ice age perhaps 30,000 years ago. (The bulk of the American Indians?) During the height of the ice age, climactic conditions might have made the passage impossible. And there is controversial and inconclusive indirect evidence that there may have been hominins in the Americas around 130,000 years ago, even before the anatomically modern humans are hypothesized to have left Africa. So these things may have gotten around, but if so their population density seems to have always been small until comparatively recently.
I wonder if there is genetic data between the Patagonian remanent people and with other hominids, to my understanding the remanent is in appearance of lighter skin,
Agree. If the claims are accurate, there seem to be genetic denosovan and neanderthal hotspots in central and south america. During the superinterglacials of mis 11 and mis 31, there seem to have been population explosions, and peopling of broader areas. Unfortunately evidence in the northern latitudes was bulldozed away by the subsequent 3-10 glacial periods. Just as much of the potential coastal route for migration is now hidden under the ocean's waves.
