ABSTRACT
The day I sat down to write these words in October 2014, my Latin American news digest announced that archaeologists in Peru had confirmed the presence of tool-making human settlements at 14,700 feet in the Andes, dating more than 12,000 years ago, a millennium earlier than anything previously known at such altitudes. 2 The goalposts marking the human longue durée in the Americas have been receding continuously in recent years. Until the 1990s, received wisdom held that humans arrived in the Americas no earlier than 13,000 or 14,000 years ago, across the Bering Strait land bridge, which disappeared underwater a couple of thousand years later. 3 But late-20th-century archaeologists began finding older remains, like the 14,800-year-old settlement at Monte Verde far south on the coast of what is now Chile. 4 Examples have multiplied since, with repeated findings of human remains more than 20,000 and even 30,000 years old. Aggressively defended by archaeologists, the Bering Strait story held up much longer than it should have, but accumulating evidence has finally dislodged it. How and when the Americas were populated by humans remains a terrain of lively, fascinating controversy.
