The Continents That Were Waiting

At the time of the Mal’ta boy’s burial, 24,000 years ago, the Americas were either uninhabited or barely inhabited by human beings.

The question of exactly when people first arrived in the Americas has been one of the most contested in all of archaeology and genetics, and it remains unresolved in its details.

But the broad consensus is that the founding migration — or founding migrations — occurred sometime between roughly 20,000 and 15,000 years ago, with the most robust archaeological and genetic evidence pointing to the earlier part of that range.

This means that when the Mal’ta boy died, the continents that would become the Americas were a world that his population — or at least the part of it that eventually contributed to the founding migration — had not yet reached.