Author: Bruce Bower / Source: Science News
Despite recently getting a cold shoulder from some researchers, a long-standing idea that North America’s first settlers entered the continent via an ice-free inland corridor boasts more scientific support than any other proposal, an international team says.
New World colonizers from Asia may also have traveled by canoe down the Northwest Pacific Coast and perhaps much farther, as critics of the ice-free corridor hypothesis have argued. But less evidence supports that possibility, archaeologist Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and colleagues argue in a research review published online August 8 in Science Advances.
Whatever route they took, people didn’t reach North America until after 16,000 years ago as temperatures rose near the end of the Ice Age and shoreline food sources expanded, the interdisciplinary group concludes. Widespread human occupations appeared in the Americas by about 13,500 years ago. Sites from this time were inhabited by the Clovis people, best known for long, triangular spearpoints used in hunting big game.
Advocates of a primarily coastal migration, however, have suggested that shoreline-hugging seafarers entered the Americas much earlier, with some archaeological evidence putting people in South America by nearly 20,000 years ago (SN: 12/26/15, p. 10). These researchers point to a study of plant and animal DNA from ancient lake beds that indicates an interior passageway through the North American Arctic could not have provided enough food until about 12,600 years ago (SN Online: 8/10/16).
Potter’s…
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