Who Really Were the First Americans?
In the 1970s, college students in archaeology such as myself learned that the first human beings to arrive in North America had come over a land bridge from Asia and Siberia approximately 13,000 to 13,500 years ago. These people, the first North Americans, were known collectively as Clovis people. Their journey was made possible, according to archaeologists far and wide, by a corridor that had opened up between giant ice sheets covering what is now Alaska and Alberta. Thus did the Clovis people move down through the North American continent, carrying their distinctive tools to various sites in the Plains States and the Southwest and then moving eastward. And all of this they did very quickly.
Significant evidence of Clovis culture had been discovered in New Mexico. In 1908, a rancher riding along an arroyo on his property near Folsom noticed what looked like large bones embedded in the embankment. They turned out to be from gigantic Ice Age bison and other late Pleistocene megafauna, such as mammoths, and they had cut marks that had clearly been made by humans. South of there, in Blackwater Draw, elegantly fashioned spear points, some about the size of the palm of your hand, turned up in the 1930s. The spear points had fluting and were large enough to fell Ice Age animals.
Clovis First, as it was called, was the one and only accepted explanation of initial human arrival and subsequent expansion throughout North and South America. To be taken seriously, any artifact of human culture had to be dated after those found at Clovis.
I remember learning all this in introductory archaeology at a college in southeastern Pennsylvania. Little did I or my professors know that a couple hundred miles away, at a place called Meadowcroft, not far from Pittsburgh, an archaeological dig led by James Adovasio was finding evidence that would cast the primacy of Clovis Man completely in doubt and produce major challenges for existing theories of how the first human beings arrived in North America...