Celebrating the 6th anniversary and over 300 postings to my blog. If you are new to the site I would encourage you to take a look at some of the earlier postings and/or check my book:

The Original Americans

The truth is that we still know very little about those that first inhabited the American Continents. Since conventional wisdom is that we all came out of Africa we must assume that these large land masses could only be populated by hominids via immigration. The same would hold true for the Continent of Australia which was inhabited no less than 48,000 years ago and possibly as early as 63,000 BC.

Meadowcroft Rockshelter is an archaeological site located near Avella in Jefferson Township, Washington County, Pennsylvania, United States. The site is a rock shelter in a bluff overlooking Cross Creek (a tributary of the Ohio River), and contains evidence that the area may have been continually inhabited for more than 19,000 years. If accurately dated, the site would be the earliest known evidence of human presence and the longest sequence of continuous human occupation in the New World.

Monte Verde is an archaeological site in southern Chile, located near Puerto Montt, Southern Chile, which has been dated to as early as 16,500 BC. Previously, the widely accepted date for early occupation at Monte Verde was ~12,500 years BC.

 This dating added to the evidence showing that the human settlement of the Americas pre-dates the Clovis culture by roughly 1000 years. This contradicts the previously accepted “Clovis first” model which holds that settlement of the Americas began after 11,500 BC.  Even more discoveries at this site suggest that it might be even older by as much as another 10,000 years.

Why would the oldest site in the Americas be in Pennsylvania? Did they just magically “pop-up” there? Did they not stop and “settle” for a while on their journey? I’m just asking. Wouldn’t the original travelers that came via a land bridge from Asia not find the climate along the Pacific coast attractive. What was wrong with California? It was not heavily populated at the time.

What about the possibility that the site in Chili being even older than the one in North America. That must be impossible, or is it?

What I imagine is that we have more to learn and that the dates will continue to grow older.