Study claims Humans reached North America 130,000 years ago

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Is the conventional chronology of human migration little more than a house of cards? Maybe. And there’s a strong wind (or at least a tantalizing breeze) blowing in from southern California, where researchers say they have evidence that the First Americans may have arrived on the continent almost ten times earlier than we thought. And here’s another kicker: the first humans in the Americas may not have been Homo sapiens.

The results, published today in Nature, came out of several different lines of inquiry, all leading to the same stunning conclusion: A partial mastodon skeleton unearthed near San Diego appears to have been processed by some kind of hominin about 130,000 years ago.

To put this in context, right now the generally accepted arrival date for humans in the Americas — from Siberia, via the land bridge Beringia — is a mere 15,000 years ago. There have been a handful of sites from Brazil and Chile to the Great Plains of the U.S. suggesting human activity up to 40,000 years ago, but academic opinion on the legitimacy of those sites is deeply divided.

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