Message #3792

[Bianca]

                                                                                                           continued


THE CURRENT EVIDENCE (1988)


Modern dating methods,combined with continued excavation of sites, have led to a completely new picture of early human occupation of the New World.  We can summarize only a small part of the key evidence here.

Before the 1970s, and indeed in some opinions into the 1980s, the Clovis spear points were thought to be the oldest evidence of human beings in the New World.  They are now reliabley dated to about 12,000 years ago (10,000BC).  Where did the people who made the Clovis points come from?  The prevailing wisdom holds that they had come over the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska on a land bridge that existed at a time when the sea level had been lowered by the glaciers.  The climate in that area was inhospitable, but no other means of access to the New World was apparent, and the land bridge was known to be open 12,000 years ago.

The most popular theory was that of Paul Martin, who proposed that human beings entered the New World in a migration from Asia across the Bering Strait in about 10,000BC and expanded rapidly in population, causing the extinction of the large animals roaming America at that time.  This has been called the "overkill hypothesis."  It comes from the observation that in the same time frame, we find both a sharp increase in the number of ancient human sites and a sharp drop in the population of large animals.  The Cayce readings give some support to the idea that people had planned the extinction of large animals, but they also say that climatic change was largely responsible for the earlier extinction near 50,000BC
(no.5249-1, June 12, 1944).  This climate-change theory also receives some scientific support and the debate continues between Martin and others in a book called QUATERNARY EXTINCTIONS: A PREHISTORIC REVOLUTION, as to whether climate or people hastened the extinctions.  Still, as recently as the early 1970s, few questioned the 10,000BC date for peoples's first entry into North America.