Humans Could Have Arrived In North America More Than 30,000 Years Ago..

For several decades, the prevailing theory was that humans first arrived in North America around 11,500 to 13,000 years ago, via a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. The Clovis people were then thought to have migrated south and across North and then into South America. Beringia - the land bridge - is thought to have then been submerged at the end of the last ice-age.

This had been the accepted theory for quite some time.

And then genetic sequencing and some physical evidence raised questions and appeared to establish the arrival of humans to North America much earlier than previously believed. That the arrival time may have been 20,000 years ago. Questions were raised after several sites were found near the coast, whether coastal crossings had also occurred. As Quentin Mackie, an anthropologist who was part of the team that found evidence of crossings around 20,000 years ago noted, land crossings completely ignores the possibility of coastal crossings by boat and that there is evidence of boat crossings between Japan and and the mainland of Asia dating back 30,000 to 35,000 years ago.

For Mackie, the archaeological riches of the British Columbian coast reveal a key flaw in the original Bering Land Bridge theory: its bias toward an inland, rather than a marine, route. “People say the coast is a wild, nasty environment,” said Mackie, a stoutly built man with an unruly gray beard and battered green hat, as he took a break from using a screen to sift through rock and earth from the Quadra dig site. “But you have lots of food resources. These were the same people as us, with the same brains. And we know that in Japan people routinely moved back and forth from the mainland to the outer islands by boat as long ago as 30,000 to 35,000 years.”​

Now evidence from a cave in Mexico may push that date back even further.

Archaeologists have obtained radiocarbon dates for the faunal bones excavated from Coxcatlan Cave, a dry rock shelter located within the southern portion of the Tehuacan Valley, southern Puebla, Mexico. The dates for the bone samples from the early depositional levels of the cave ranged from 33,448 to 28,279 years old.​

The cave did act as a dry rock shelter for hunter gatherers and there is evidence of their using the caves for these purposes. Tools have been recovered and they have been able to date the layers of the cave over recent years.

These bones of fauna were found in the earliest period of the cave. The queries have arisen as the carbon dating from the bones date back to over 30,000 years ago. Certainly, these bones may have been there prior to any human arrival. However some of the bones that were found and dated, appear to have been processed by humans - by way of butchering and "thermal alterations" on some of the bones.. A link to the study can be found here:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...uacan-valley/F4C32FB10E73D660CB7D9B44E2C29A72​

If there is a human link after these bones are further examined, it could very well push back the arrival date of humans by several thousands of years.

“If closer examination of the bones provides evidence of a human link, it will change what we know about the timing and how the first people came to America,” Dr. Somerville said.

“Pushing the arrival of humans in North America back to over 30,000 years ago would mean that humans were already in North America prior to the period of the Last Glacial Maximum, when the Ice Age was at its absolute worst.”

“Large parts of North America would have been inhospitable to human populations. The glaciers would have completely blocked any passage over land coming from Alaska and Canada, which means people probably would have had to come to the Americas by boats down the Pacific coast.”​

Is it possible that a first wave of humans arrived by boats down the Pacific Coast?

Either way, it's a pretty interesting find..

 

It would depend on where the boat landed, the type of timber used to make the boat and how it was preserved. I doubt we will ever see the remains of such boats though. It would have rotted away.

It makes sense that these people were not just walking through the strait, but would have been living along it as well. Given the fact humans were using boats to cross areas of ocean, it isn't that far fetched to imagine their using boats or crafts to come down the coast for any stretch, possibly to find food or simply to explore.

There is a belief that H. erectus used sea-crafts to be able to reach some of the islands of Indonesia. Ancestral humans used a variety of boats and canoe's in the past. We know that early H. sapiens had developed some seafaring skills 70,000 to 50,000 years ago. And we know this because they settled in Australia. The water levels were not that high, but not all of it would have been manageable on foot either, so some ability to make a raft or dugout or canoe, etc, was necessary.

So I am not surprised that they could have made some crafts of some sort or design to travel down the American coast.

Pretty cool if those bones were butchered by humans though.