The archaeological evidence left behind by the first people to settle the Americas tells a confusing story. Researchers have long understood that people migrated from Siberia to Alaska across a region called Beringia, which included a now-submerged land bridge — but they disagree whether the artifacts at Siberian sites resemble those on the other side of the Bering Strait. And the few skulls they’ve found of the earliest Americans don’t look much like those of modern Native Americans.
The sparse and sometimes conflicting data raised questions about who the first settlers of the Americas were, when they arrived and whether other waves of migration followed. The lack of evidence inspired some, shall we say, “esoteric” theories of Paleolithic settlers boating over from France or Polynesia. “For a while, everybody could [seem] right,” says Ted Goebel, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University who has worked at sites on both sides of ...
