Settlement Timeline Reset

over the timing of human migration into the New World. The scant evidence often dated from within 15,000 years of the current day. Now a find, the implements conclusively date back more than 30,000 years. Because in prehistory a glacier covered much of North America, researchers had assumed there was no route south from the Bering Strait until an ice-free corridor opened inland. Until now that was assumed to have been about 13,000 years ago, and recent work points to an even later opening. Some scholars began to argue that Siberians could have come by boat—crossing the Bering Strait and traveling down the Pacific coast, but leaving little trace of themselves. That logic explains traces found in 1975 of human habitation at Monte Verde, in southern Chile, dating back more than 16,000 years. The evidence in the Chiquihuite study, by an international research team, is unambiguous: 1,900 tools for daily life, such as knives, arrowheads, and scrapers, crafted in a style previously unseen—and not explained by activities and events unaributable to humans. The cave search yielded ancient plant and animal DNA and researchers may yet find human DNA there, but at this time they cannot link the site to any known group of Native Americans. The tools’ age suggests a scenario of successive waves of migration and colonization of the New World over many millennia.