Flutterby™! : Humans in North America 130k years ago?

Remarkable New Evidence for Human Activity in North America 130,000 Years Ago

The team’s findings, published today in the journal Nature, could upend our current understanding of when humans arrived in North America—already a flashpoint among archaeologists. Recent theories posit that people first migrated to the continent about 15,000 years ago along a coastal route, as Jason Daley writes in Smithsonian. But in January, a new analysis of horse remains from the Bluefish Caves by archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars suggested that humans may have lived on the continent as early as 24,000 years ago.

The new study, however, suggests that some type of hominin species—early human relatives from the genus Homo—was bashing up mastodon bones in North America about 115,000 years earlier than the commonly accepted date. That’s a staggeringly early date, and one that is likely to raise eyebrows. There is no other archaeological evidence attesting to such an early human presence in North America.