Humans May Have Been in Americas for 130,000 Years
Assigning dates to the peopling of the Americas has always been controversial
Fossilized human footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico, United States are approximately 23,000 years old according new evidence published in The New York Times that one archeologist is calling “probably the biggest discovery about the peopling of America in a hundred years.”
By placing human beings in the Americas 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, this discovery could fundamentally change our understanding of the origins of our species. Less publicized research, however, suggests that humans have been in the Americas for 50,000 to 130,000 years ago, indicating that these footprints may only be the tip of the iceberg.
While archeologists cannot date stone, they can use radiocarbon dating techniques to identify the age of organic material that contains carbon. At White Sands, an international team of scientists has been focusing on ancient ditch grass seeds growing on top of the footprints in thick, layered blankets. The oldest layer of seeds is approximately 22,800 years old, indicating the footprints beneath are at least that old.
The discovery is what archeologists call “unequivocal:” the evidence is beyond question. Plus, the footprints offer a striking visual that anyone can comprehend. A layperson can see the human imprints baked into stone and accept their legitimacy without needing to make a courageous mental leap. Compare this to stone tools, for example. To the naked eye, many may just look like broken stones that have not been altered by humans.
This is important because archaeology has always been reluctant to accept new evidence of great human antiquity in the Americas. The unequivocal nature of this discovery means they must accept it.
At the beginning of the 20th century, mainstream archeology asserted humans had been in the Americas for no more than 4,000 years. This was the view of Aleš Hrdlička, a Czech-born anthropologist who led the Division of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC from 1903 to 1943. Hrdlička developed the theory that humans came to America from Asia across the Bering Strait, and he asserted that anatomically modern humans could only have developed in the so called “Old World.”
During Hrdlička’s tenure at the Smithsonian, “questions of early man in America became virtually taboo,” one of his colleagues would later admit. “No anthropologist desirous of a successful career would tempt the fate of ostracism by intimating that he had discovered indications of respectable antiquity for the Indian.”
In the 1930s, crafted stone projectiles and fluted points found by anthropologist Edgar B. Howard near the town of Clovis, New Mexico proved beyond doubt that humans must have been in the Americas for at least 12,000 years. When Howard presented his findings at a conference in 1937, Hrdlička, who was in the audience, did not accept them.
Archeologists would eventually discover 1,500 sites from the so-called “Clovis people” as far apart as Alaska, Florida, and Mexico. From the 1940s until approximately the 2000s, the “Clovis first” theory — that Clovis people were first human inhabitants who created a widespread culture in the Americas between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago — came to dominate mainstream archeology.
In the 1970s, Canadian archeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars found evidence of human activity 24,000 years ago at the Blue Fish Caves in the Yukon. The archeological community flatly did not accept his findings. They were subjected to debate for decades, “one of the most acrimonious — and unfruitful — in all of science,” according to the journal Nature. Funding for his research soon dried up. Cinq-Mars, whose findings would eventually be vindicated, likened all this to the Spanish Inquisition.
Later, more and more evidence began to appear. In the 1990s, an excavation 8,000 miles south of the Bering Strait in Chile at a site called Mount Verde in Chile by anthropologist Tom Dillehay suggested that humans had been in the Americas for at least 18,000 years. A half dozen other sites including the Topper site in Allendale County South Carolina, the Friedkin site in Texas, and Cueva Fell in Chile, would eventually erode the foundation of the Clovis-first theory.
Al Topper found more than 40,000 Clovis artifacts at a site in Allendale County, South Carolina in 1998 after digging down through 10,000 years-worth of earth — and then he decided to dig deeper.
“So we got down to the bottom of the Clovis level and then we all voted to go deeper,” Topper tells author Graham Hancock in the latter’s 2019 book America Before. After another half meter of sand and gravel the excavators found older artifacts. “My ‘aha’ was more of an uh-oh. Everybody else was going ‘aha’ but they weren’t going to have to stand up at national conferences and defend what we’d found.”
Using two dating methods, Topper’s team found the artifacts to be approximately 50,000 years old. “The skeptics keep saying that what we’ve found can’t be a human site and that our artifacts must be works of nature because they’re so different from the artifacts found at other sites,” Topper tells Hancock. “To which my response is: ‘Well…you’ve never dug a 50,000 year-old site in America, right? There’s a first time for everything.’”
A pattern begins to emerge. More recent dates for humankind’s “arrival” in the Americas are accepted as fact stand until new evidence pushes the dates back. The archeological community, which in each case has spent decades coalescing around and staking careers upon the more recent dates, responds in ways ranging from healthy skepticism to dogmatic denial.
More “equivocal” evidence published in Nature in 2017 suggests humans have been in the Americas for at least 130,000 years. The discovery, named the Cerutti Mastodon site after Richard Cerutti who found it in 1993 near San Diego, California, consisted of sharply broken mastodon fossils found alongside five large stones that appeared to have been used as hammers and anvils.
While the San Diego findings have not surmounted the wall of scrutiny erected by many archeologists, this larger pattern should give us pause. The White Sands and Bluefish Caves sites unequivocally disprove the “Clovis-first” theory, which itself replaced Hrdlička’s 4,000-year timeline.
Another discovery in 20 years may push back the timeline back even further, and another discovery in 40 years, and so on. So with how much confidence should we accept the current timeline for the peopling of the Americas?
There’s a saying “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” This means that the lack of evidence for something does not confirm that the thing does not exist. Furthermore, as we have seen, the field of archeology is institutionally and instinctively invested in downplaying evidence greater human antiquity in the Americas.
While the White Sands footprints are rightly being hailed as a revelation, new evidence of greater antiquity might be a few layers of earth below — only waiting for well-funded open minds to dig deeper.
