Why the Story Cannot End With Simple Answers

The history of research on the first Americans — from Lund’s nineteenth-century cave excavations to the twenty-first-century genomic analyses — is a history of progressive complication.

Each generation of researchers has found that the simple story inherited from the previous generation needed to be revised in response to new evidence.

The simple story once was: the Americas were empty before a single wave of migrants crossed from Asia and populated both continents.

Then it became: the Americas were populated by multiple migrations from Asia, perhaps with an earlier wave or two followed by the ancestors of modern Native Americans.