The theory of "Clovis First" that the Paleo-Indians came to the New World along the Bering Isthmus 13.5 thousand years ago is increasingly criticized. Most likely, the first Americans appeared in the New World much earlier. But it won't be easy to find the details of their existence.
Until the early 2000s, it was generally accepted that the first people came to America through the Bering Strait, which then - 13.5 thousand years ago - was not a strait, but a long land isthmus. Representatives of the oldest archaeological culture on the American continent, Clovis, left a few stone and bone tools and rough pottery to archaeologists. But their anthropology is known for only two finds: the remains of a boy, nicknamed Anzik-1 (Montana, 2013), and a girl (Mexican Yucatan, 2014).
People of the Clovis culture still appear in textbooks as the first people of the Americas, but in recent years there is more and more evidence that even before them, 25-15 thousand years ago, Homo sapiens lived in the New World. True, there are still more questions than answers about when and how they got to the new shores.
In a new scoping study published in the journal Science, anthropologists look at the evidence that exists today for early human migration to the American continent - mostly circumstantial. The isthmus between Siberia and Alaska rose out of the water only 13.5 thousand years ago, so if people arrived in America before, they traveled by sea.
According to the previously popular theory of coastal migration, people of the late Pleistocene followed herds of large land mammals, the meat of which formed the basis of their diet. However, in recent years, the theory of the "kelp highway hypothesis", according to which people first settled along the coast, where they ate marine mammals, mollusks and other inhabitants of coastal ecosystems, is gaining more and more obscurity. According to the authors of the article, exactly where the edge of the Pacific Ocean passed 25-15 thousand years ago, one should look for archaeological evidence of the first settlers to America.
The search for this evidence is complicated by the fact that since the last Ice Age, the coast has shifted inland, and the land on which the first Paleo-Indians may have lived is now under water.
So far, the evidence for the "algal highway" hypothesis has largely been that such a migration route was possible; there are few data that directly indicate the presence of man in America before the discovery of the Bering Isthmus. There are, for example, finds from the Oscilla River in Florida - the bones of a mastodon, apparently killed by a man, and bone weapons; they are 1000 years older than the most ancient things of the Clovis culture. The authors of the work suggest looking for new evidence of early waves of migration to America in caves and coastal zones where the coastline has not changed too much over the past 20,000 years.
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