The Peopling Of The Americas — What Ancient DNA Has Revealed

The question of who the ancient Texans were is inseparable from the larger question of who the first Americans were and how they got here.

And on that question, ancient DNA science has produced some of the most surprising findings in the history of human genetics.

The long-dominant model for the peopling of the Americas was the Clovis First hypothesis: the first humans entered North America from northeastern Asia across the Bering Land Bridge, moved south through an ice-free corridor between the retreating Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets, and spread rapidly across the continent.

The Clovis people — named for their distinctive fluted stone projectile points, first identified near Clovis, New Mexico — were thought to be the founding population of the Americas, their descendants diversifying into all the Indigenous nations that Europeans later encountered.