Clovis tools can be found all over North America (Image: Carolina Biological Supply, Co/Visuals Unlimited, Inc/SPL) From the old world to the new
NOT SO long ago there was a simple and seemingly incontrovertible answer to the question of how and when the first settlers made it to the Americas. Some 13,000 years ago, a group of people from Asia walked across a land bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska and headed south.
These people, known to us as the Clovis, were accomplished toolmakers and hunters. Subsisting largely on big game killed with their trademark flint spears, they prospered and spread out across the continent.
For decades this was the received wisdom. So compelling was the Clovis First model that few archaeologists even contemplated an alternative. Some with the temerity to do so complained of a “Clovis police”, intent on suppressing dissent.
No longer. Thanks to recent discoveries, the identity of the first Americans is an open question again. Clovis First is not quite dead, but most researchers now accept it is no longer a good fit for the evidence. And so the question must be asked again: when were the Americas first settled, and by whom?
The colonisation of the Americas has long fascinated and frustrated archaeologists. It was the last great human migration, the final leg of our journey out of Africa to lay claim to Earth’s habitable continents. Big-game hunters from Asia were always considered likely candidates, but it wasn’t until the mid-1960s that this idea was formulated into the Clovis First model, primarily by archaeologist C. Vance Haynes of the University of Arizona in Tucson.…
