Overview

When the first Europeans visited North American, there were populations of Native Americans already living here. Many cultures of Native peoples hold the belief that they have always lived on these American continents, but scholars continue to ponder questions about their origins.  Did the peoples of the Americas migrate here, and if so, when and from where? In recent decades, archaeologists, anthropologists, and college textbook editors have treated one hypothesis as fact: the Clovis people were the first people in the Americas. However, recent finds have turned up data that contradicts this hypothesis. Evidence of a pre-Clovis civilization has arisen at many different sites across North and South America.
            
According to the Bering Strait hypothesis, the Clovis were ancestors of the hunting and gathering cultures of northern Russia, who followed the herds of reindeer and other prehistoric game across the Bering land bridge and into the Americas about 11,500 years ago. For the past half century, it was commonly assumed that these were the first people to inhabit this continent.  They crossed the land bridge, trudged through an ice-free corridor into the United States, and scattered south and east from there, eventually reaching South America 500 years later. The dates of the opening of this ice-free corridor also line up with the date on a projectile point found with the remains of a mammoth in Clovis, New Mexico, which also dated to 11,500 years ago. At the time of the discovery, the point was the oldest artifact found in North America that was scientifically verified by radio carbon dating.

The uniquely formed spear point became known as the Clovis point, and the group of people who manufactured this point became known as the Clovis Culture. Many scientists therefore believed that the Clovis Culture must be the original migrants into the Americas. However, this hypothesis had its weak points.  In order for the people who came through the ice-free corridor to reach South America within 500 years, they would have had to sprint their way through the United States and Mesoamerica.  Furthermore, many sites across the Americas that have yielded pre-Clovis artifacts, evidence of a human population before the first of the Clovis arrived.

Following the discovery of the Clovis spear points, hundreds of pre-Clovis finds were announced and then dismissed for failure to positively answer one or more of the three most crucial questions asked when dating an archaeological site:

• Are there artifacts of indisputable human manufacture that are recovered in primary depositional context?
• Is there clear and unambiguous stratigraphy?
• Have multiple radiometric determinations shown indisputable internal consistency?

Then in 1974, Dr. James Adovasio began research at what would later be recognized as the first verified pre-Clovis site. Located in Washington County, Pennsylvania, a natural overhanging rock shelter known as Meadowcroft would become the location for 30 years of research. Eventually this site would yield 2 million artifacts ranging from the microscopic plant remains to bifaced stone spear points. These Late Pleistocene artifacts would subsequently be dated to about 14,000 years ago.

Several other sites now under investigation appear to be as old as, if not older, than the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter.  Cactus Hill, located near the Nottoway River in southern Virginia has yielded the oldest confirmed record to date of human habitation in North America. Four inches below a sealed Clovis layer, in an unmistakably separate older horizon, are hearth and charcoal concentrations and, beneath these, an array of stone tools.  The hearth and tools horizon has been carbon dated at or about 18,000 years ago. Another pre-Clovis site called Topper is located on the Savannah River in South Carolina.  Dr. Albert Goodyear has found an assemblage of stone flakes, burins, microblades, and blade cores there.  Some of the chert used to make these artifacts was not locally mined, indicating that it was brought in from somewhere else.  The lithic suite of artifacts dates back to at least 15, 000 to 16,000 years ago.