Topic
The study of when and how humans first reached and settled North and South America, including debates over migration routes and ancestral populations.
Kelly Graf and co-authors report a 13,800-year-old camp in interior Alaska holding the oldest known needles in the Western Hemisphere. Stone tools from the camp resemble Siberian types, a link between eastern Beringia and northeast Asia.
Reality
Researchers report that pollen in White Sands rock shows conifers and a lake 24,200 years ago giving way to oak and sagebrush in two millennia. The authors say the people who left the footprints kept using the area as it warmed.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
University of Kansas researchers report more than 80,000 specimens from an Alaskan ridge occupied 13,800 to 12,700 years ago. Three dated components allow a comparison across 1,100 years, if finds are reported component by component.
Reality
Bethany Potter's University of Kansas team argues the evidence best fits people reaching the Americas 14,000 to 20,000 years ago. The paper reweighs published genetic, archaeological and climate evidence in a debate that still has no conclusive proof.
Reality
Kansas researchers say genetic evidence puts the arrival of today's Indigenous peoples' ancestors in the Americas no earlier than 21,000 years ago. That bound weighs against entry before the ice age's coldest peak, though the authors say gaps in sampling leave room for earlier groups.
Reality
Dundee's Christopher Rynn has reconstructed the face of the Punin-2 man, an Andean hunter-gatherer of 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Local advice shaped its eyes, so the portrait adds little against the old Oceanic and archaic readings, and Rynn says ancient DNA will settle lineage.
Reality