28 September 2019 | New Scientist | 3“CLOVIS First” was once the rallying
call of archaeologists studying
humanity’s settlement of the
Americas. It referred to the idea
that the prehistoric people who
made the distinctive Clovis bone and
ivory tools must have been the first
human to enter the New World, about
13,000 years ago. Now we know better.
Like much of the received wisdom
about human evolution, the peopling
of the Americas has been subject to
revision in recent years. New discoveries
leave no doubt that people arrived
earlier than 13,000 years ago, possibly
far earlier. Some of the evidence for
occupation is still hotly contested.
Who the pioneers were is also proving
difficult to pin down. However, there
seems little doubt that they entered
the last continental landmass to beinhabited by humans from the north.
They came via Beringia, an area centred
on the Bering Strait between Siberia
and Alaska. These people also didn’t
simply migrate through this subarctic
region. They took up residence there
and became isolated from the rest of
humanity for thousands of years, as the
world was plunged into an icy period.
These were the first people known
to inhabit subarctic regions. We are
now starting to piece together the storyof how they survived in this harsh
environment, and how that experience
shaped them genetically and
physically (see page 34). Intriguingly,
we can track some of their genetic
adaptations right down into Central
and South America, where they could
explain puzzling anomalies found
in ancient human remains and among
modern indigenous Americans.
“Clovis First” has now been
comprehensively refuted and a new
picture is emerging. The conquest of the
New World didn’t entail a single group
of people marching from north to south.
There were different populations, ebbing
and flowing and interbreeding.
In other words, it is complicated.
But that is the new normal when it
comes to human evolution. And it will
continue to be so. Watch this space. ❚America’s first
The story of how humans got to the Americas isn’t a simple one
Indigenous
Americans have
genes that helped
ancestral peoples
survive the
subarcticPATRICK^ ZAC
HMANN/MAGNUM^ PHOTO
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