PEOPLING
- Jun 2
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 24
The subject of the peopling of the Americas was always messy and it’s getting even more interesting all the time. Some will insist folks have always been on these lands while others conjecture about a traversal from Asia, across land, ice, or sea, or all of the above. When any of that took place is still more complicated. I bring this up here because so many disruptive findings have emerged in recent years, much of which changes the story pretty significantly but also doesn’t seem to have permeated the culture.
Unfortunately, more and better anthropology and archaeology has not made the picture much clearer; and, at least to my eye, things actually appear muddier than ever. This is largely because as the dates of various finds of human modified tools and landscapes are pushed deeper into history, fewer and fewer examples exist and those are preserved less and less well.
Also obscuring much of the picture is surely the fact that so much water for so long was locked away within the continent’s incomprehensibly massive glaciers. The melting of all that resulted in the present seashore being nowhere near where it just recently was. This glacial retreat and rising ocean is so significant because that historic coastline, just as today, was a place where transportation was easy, food was diverse and abundant, and settlement locations would have made sense. To be clear, going 10,000 or 15,000 years back and even just along the BC coast, recent studies suggest sea levels moving not plus or minus a few meters but closer to a hundred. Depending on the location and time period, you’re looking at a shift of coastline around 80m above and 150m below where they’re now found. (For scale, the tallest building on Vancouver Island at the time of writing is the 85m Hudson Place One at 777 Herald Street.) Though I’m no paleoarcheologist, it seems like it would be pretty hard to find shell middens or stone tools kilometres out to sea, far below the surface, and then buried under ten thousand years of sediment, even if you had a cool submersible sporting all the neatest tools and tech.
That said, preserved footprints and implements found in recent years have given even the very skeptical reason to admit people must have been here long before any dates found in the textbooks they were trained on. The hypothesis for most of my lifetime has been that the Cordilleran Ice Sheet covered everything we think of as British Columbia and the west coast, including southern Yukon and Alaska. And that mass, far beyond a million square kilometres and a couple of kilometres deep, was smashed up against the Laurentide Ice Sheet, at about where the Rockies stand, and which covered the rest of present-day Canada along with a good swathe of the northern US. And that darn mass was undoubtedly impassable. Think about any photos or film you’ve seen of the calving face of even a small glacier. That thing isn't formidable or near-impossible to surmount. No. No one is getting up there without a helicopter. And once you’re up there, in your paleolithic flying machine, don’t you have an unending set of new problems — the least of all being a continent-sized maze composed of bottomless ice-crevasses? Yes. [Insert a video clip of a lady in furs asking ChatGPT 'How to survive on a glacier' just before the phone slips from her hand and down an indigo abyss.] Well, this problem of maximally vast slabs of two kilometre-thick ice, paired with the fact of human presence on the continent, led some to speculate about the necessity of an ice-free corridor opening up, probably between these two glaciers, and to seek out evidence for that.
By my reading, however, it’s looking like that idea, of glacier-less gaps, has fallen flat. All the evidence gathered for parting of these seas of ice was pegged to, at most, about 13,800 years ago. That timeline worked fine until just recently when a team of researchers revealed their discovery of more than a dozen unique projectile points. What made these bits of knapped stone so special, and what was immediately obvious, was that they were unlike the ubiquitous “Clovis points” that dominate the dig sites throughout this continent, far more closely resembling “western stemmed points” like those found from the Upper Paleolithic around Japan. In addition to that, when these projectile points were dated they turned out to be at least 2,000 years older than all prior evidence for the earliest human presence on the continent. That’s what you call a big find. Of course, these projectile points immediately destroyed the idea of an ice-free inland corridor as a first arrival route while also simultaneously shattering the long-standing “Clovis First” hypothesis. (Clovis being the name of the town in New Mexico where the first discoveries of what to that point seemed to be the oldest artefacts in the Americas and thus products of the original culture populating this place.) The abundance of these Clovis-related finds had given us a window of 12,000 to 14,000 years ago for first arrival. Now that looks too recent. Folks were deep into the continent, around modern-day Idaho, which was the site of this most recent dig, by 15,700 years ago — making the parting of the ice just way too recent to have accommodated these much earlier arrivals.
This new date actually looked perfect as samples of both human and dog DNA support an arrival date around this same time. Obviously, humans have taken dogs just about everywhere they’ve ever gone. (And with any luck they’ll be pooping all over the Moon and Mars in no time…[Insert gif of a 22nd century Shiba Inu, leg up and peeing on a Mars-based, Falcon rocket-shaped memorial to first human arrival.]) Dogs aren’t just helpful in every way and our best friends (says the parent of guinea pigs, budgies, fish, shrimp, crabs, a praying mantis, and a cat but never a dog) but they can tell us a great deal, too. The genetics from dogs found in the Americas insists divergence from their Asian relatives, with a huge population explosion, occurred around 16,400 years ago. (For more on local dogs check out The Teachings of Mutton: A Coast Salish Woolly Dog by Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa.) On the human side, the DNA samples gifted to science thus far strongly suggest all those we consider indigenous to the Americas descend from five founding maternal lineages, with one common ancestor living between 18,000 and 15,000 years ago. Though that could change a little with more and better DNA and analysis, what exists is pretty strong evidence on its own. And don’t we love when things nicely match up just so? For sure. But even these dates for a time of first arrival have actually now been blown up, too. KA-BLAMO!
Researchers recently found what nearly doubles the age of human arrival on this continent, just shattering what’s published in all the textbooks relating to Clovis-related finds and even the very recent and groundbreaking projectile points and DNA analysis. As you can imagine, this news ruffled feathers and made headlines. Though almost laughed off when originally published, diverging so far from anything previously uncovered or even hypothesized, this extraordinary claim was soon paired with extraordinary evidence. The site, in White Sands National Park, New Mexico, contains a vast collection of footprints laid down in what was at that time a muddy lake bottom. The tracks belong to ancient mammoths, ground sloths, and camels — all now extinct (unless, of course, they’re chillin’ with sasquatch on the Olympic Peninsula). Among those tracks are scores of human footprints. The first date that came back for an age estimate of those prints landed in the range of 20,000 years old. But their dating method had some inherent weaknesses. The researchers were well aware of those, of course, and just about everyone interested in such things was also quick to point those out. What followed was further investigation including a battery of different and highly reliable dating techniques. What returned was a consilience of evidence strongly supporting the earlier study’s claim that these tracks were impressed into the sand and sediment sometime between 23,000 and 20,000 years ago.
Take that — all previous estimates. *Karate chops*
And none of this even gets into more contentious offerings, like Solutrean or Si-Te-Cah hypotheses. I’ll leave you to go down those rabbit holes yourself. But, needless to say, there was more going on in the Americas and far earlier than most folks ever appreciated, even by diligent academicians and authors trying to provide a best guess and some reliable accounting. Personally, I love that the accepted wisdom is continually being overturned. Love it! (For more on these themes, check out the kelp highway hypothesis.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Quaternary Science Reviews, 2018 - A revised sea level history for the northern Strait of Georgia, British Columbia, Canada
Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences, 2023 - Cordilleran Ice Sheet
Earth-Science Reviews, 2022 - Evolution of the Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets
Exposure Labs, 2012 - "CHASING ICE" captures largest glacier calving ever filmed
Imperial College London, 2022 - Ice-free corridor opened too late to be population route for the Americas
Science, 2019 - Late Upper Paleolithic occupation at Cooper’s Ferry, Idaho, USA, ~16,000 years ago
Big Think, 2022 - Clovis debunked: America’s first settlers did not take the ice-free corridor
University of Copenhagen, 2012 - Clovis-first theory is put to rest at Paisley Caves
Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, 2023 - The Stemmed Projectile Points of the Terminal Pleistocene in Hokkaido, Northern Japan
Hammond-Kaarremaa, 2025 - The Teachings of Mutton: A Coast Salish Woolly Dog
US National Park Service, 2024 - Fossilized Footprints
Science, 2023 - Independent age estimates resolve the controversy of ancient human footprints at White Sands
University Oregon, 2023 - New data suggests a timeline for arrival of the first Americans
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2023 - Windows of opportunity for the peopling of the Americas
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2023 - Peopling of the Americas
Stefan Milo, 2023 - The World's Most Heavily Debated Footprints
Stefan Milo, 2023 - Did Polynesians Reach America? DNA Evidence
UBC Press, 2005 - Haida Gwaii: Human History and Environment from the Time of Loon to the Time of the Iron People
