T-Day geek post #3

In 1936, some shaped stone points, intended to be placed on a shaft and used for hunting, were found in a cave near Clovis, New Mexico. They were clearly of human design and were dated to roughly 11,000 BCE, or 13,000 years ago. Many more of these points, which became known as Clovis points, have been found. From this discovery grew the hypothesis that humans arrived in the Western hemisphere about 13,000 years ago as a result of following game over the land bridge that then existed across the Bering Strait.

"That had been repeated so many times in textbooks and lectures it became part of the common lore," said Dennis Stanford, curator of archeology at the Smithsonian Institution. "People forgot it was only an unproven hypothesis."

An unproved and now doubtful hypothesis, as several sites have been discovered in the Americas that can be dated much earlier, to 15,000 or 17,000 years ago, perhaps even earlier.

Perhaps even much earlier, as CNN reported on November 17:

Archaeologists say a site in South Carolina may rewrite the history of how the Americas were settled by pushing back the date of human settlement thousands of years. ...

An archaeologist from the University of South Carolina on Wednesday announced radiocarbon tests that dated the first human settlement in North America to 50,000 years ago - at least 25,000 years before other known human sites on the continent.

The site, called Topper, is near Allendale, South Carolina, on the Savannah River about 60 miles south of Columbia.

If true, the find represents a revelation for scientists studying how humans migrated to the Americas. ...

This new discovery suggests humans may have crossed the land bridge into the Americas much earlier [than previously thought] - possibly during an ice age - and rapidly colonized the two continents.

"If" of course being the operative word. Some are doubtful and some reject the idea that what was found at the site shows signs of human manipulation. And the work has not yet appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, although that's supposed to happen next year. But as skeptic Theodore Schurr, anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, noted,

"[i]f [the radiocarbon] dating is confirmed, then it really does have a significant impact on our previous understanding of New World colonization."

We already know that "protohumans" reached Indonesia nearly 2 million years ago, meaning they left Africa hundreds of thousands of years earlier than thought. And we also already know that homo sapiens spread earlier and more rapidly than had been thought. So maybe - maybe - this is one more leap in a process of learning that we're rather more ancient than we have believed.