But the convergent evidence from multiple dating approaches gives the research team and the broader scientific community good reason to take the Last Glacial Maximum ages seriously and to build additional research on the foundation that those ages provide.

The Long Argument About Who Was First

The debate about who the first Americans were and when they arrived is not new.

It has been running, in various forms, for as long as Western scientists have been aware of the remarkable diversity and antiquity of Indigenous cultures in the Americas — which is to say, since at least the late eighteenth century.

The earliest serious discussions of the antiquity of human presence in the Americas grappled with the fundamental question of how people could have reached two continents that appeared to be surrounded by ocean.

The Bering Strait connection — the land bridge that geological evidence would eventually confirm as real — was proposed as a possible route in the eighteenth century, decades before the geological evidence for it had been assembled.