The story of the earliest Americans

Excavation of the Schaefer mammoth in Wisconsin, which is thought by archaeologists to date to about 14,500 years ago.

Before 30,000 years ago, there wasn’t anyone living anywhere in North or South America. These continents were some of the last places on Earth to be filled with people. But, the story of who those people were, how they got there, and what they did when they came is becoming less of a mystery.

An excavation of the Buttermilk Creek locality of the Gault Clovis site in Texas, an archaeological site dating to about 13,000 years ago.

Scientists are using all kinds of ways to look back in time and tell the story of the first Americans, say Ted Goebel of Texas A&M University and other researchers. First of all, scientists can compare the genes of Native Americans with those of people all over the world to figure out where Native Americans’ ancient ancestors lived. The genetic information points to southern Siberia as the homeland of the first Americans.

Archaeologists are also finding stone tools and traces of old campfires in places like Alaska, Wisconsin and Chile in South America. These archaeology sites are 13,000 to 16,000 years old, which may mean that people were living in the Americas earlier than some scientists had thought.

So, how did these first people get from Siberia all the way to the tip of South America" Scientists think they might have walked across a land bridge that connected Siberia and North America 30,000 years ago. But they were probably stuck way up north until big sheets of ice melted away at the end of the last ice age and opened up a clear path to move south about 16,000 years ago.

More details about the first Americans appear in an article by Dr. Goebel and his colleagues, published in the 14 March 2008 issue of the journal Science.

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