A study that claims humans reached the Americas 130,000 years ago - much earlier than previously suggested - has run into controversy. Humans are thought to have arrived in the New World no earlier than 25,000 years ago, so the find would push back the first evidence of settlement by more than 100,000 years. The conclusions rest on analysis of animal bones and tools from California. Read more
16,700-Year-Old Tools Found in Texas Change Known History of North America
Archaeologists in Texas have found a set of 16,700-year-old tools which are among the oldest discovered in the West. Until now, it was believed that the culture that represented the continent's first inhabitants was the Clovis culture. However, the discovery of the ancient tools now challenges that theory, providing evidence that human occupation precedes the arrival of the Clovis people by thousands of years. Read more
10,000-year-old stone tools unearthed in Redmond dig
Archaeologists working near Redmond Town Center have unearthed stone tools crafted at least 10,000 years ago by some of the regions earliest inhabitants. Read more
Two separate genetic analyses have found evidence for a surprising genetic link between the native populations of the Americas and Oceania. The DNA of some native Amazonians shows significant similarity to indigenous inhabitants of Australia and Melanesia. The two research groups, however, offer contrasting interpretations of how the Americas were first peopled. Read more
Most Complete Ice Age Skeleton Helps Solve Mystery of First Americans
On Thursday, a team led by archaeologist James Chatters reported in the journal Science that they'd found a big piece of the puzzle: the most complete skeleton of such antiquity ever found in the Americas, between 12,000 and 13,000 years old. The skeleton contains both the craniofacial features of ancient Paleoamericans and mitochondrial DNA possessed by latter-day Native Americans. The skeleton, dubbed "Naia" (an ancient Greek name related to water nymphs) by her discoverers, belonged to a teenage girl who fell more than 100 feet to her death nearly a half mile inside an elaborate network of karst caves that were largely dry at the end of the Pleistocene. Divers who found Naia in the cave on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula named her watery grave Hoyo Negro ("Black Hole" in Spanish). Read more
Genetic and environmental evidence indicates that after the ancestors of Native Americans left Asia, they spent 10,000 years in shrubby lowlands on a broad land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska. Archaeological evidence is lacking because it drowned beneath the Bering Sea when sea levels rose. University of Utah anthropologist Dennis O'Rourke and two colleagues make that argument in the Friday, Feb. 28, issue of the journal Science. They seek to reconcile existing genetic and paleoenvironmental evidence for human habitation on the Bering land bridge - also called Beringia - with an absence of archaeological evidence. Read more
Humans may have reached the Americas 22,000 years ago
Humans lived in South America at the height of the last ice age, thousands of years earlier than we thought, according to a controversial study. A team claims to have found 22,000-year-old stone tools at a site in Brazil, though other archaeologists are disputing the claim. Christelle Lahaye of Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3 University in France and colleagues excavated a rock shelter in north-east Brazil and found 113 stone tools. The team dated the sediments in which the tools were buried using a technique that determines when the sediments were last exposed to light. Some tools were buried 22,000 years ago - thousands of years earlier than any known human colonisation of the Americas. Read more
Oregon stone tools enliven 'earliest Americans' debate
Scientists studying how North America was first settled have found stone spearheads and darts in Oregon, US, that date back more than 13,000 years. The hunting implements, which are of the "Western Stemmed" tradition, are at least as old as the famous Clovis tools thought for a long time to belong to the continent's earliest inhabitants. Read more