Why Don't We Know When the First People Came to North America?

Abstract

The question of when the first people came to North America defies consensus. Data from an array of fields would seem to narrow the number and timing of migrations, but that evidence is at best circumstantial and cannot be used to constrain what is strictly an archaeological matter. Advocates of a pre-12,000 B.P. human population assert that their evidence is valid and is rejected by skeptics only because of deep-set historical biases. That assertion is not well-founded. If a bias exists, it is in the assumption that there were only three discrete migrations, the earliest of which was Clovis. The possibility that these migrations were not discrete episodes involving small founding populations, but instead may have been migratory dribbles spread over thousands of years, has implications for understanding the variation evident among modern descendant populations and the archaeological variability of Clovis. The possibility that there were early, pre-12,000 B.P. migrations that may have been wholly unrelated to Clovis and failed, may have equally important implications for why we don"t know when the first people came to North America.