The First Americans

The standard story of the peopling of the Americas holds that wanderers from Northeast Asia fanned out across the Great Plains, into the Southwest and eventually the East to become the founding populations of today's Native Americans. Stone spear points found in Clovis, N.M., in the 1930s were dated at 11,000 years ago and hailed as evidence of the oldest human settlement in the New World. The story was so tidy that any skeletons that seemed to challenge this "Clovis model" were shoved back into the closet by the mandarins of American anthropology; any stone tools that seemed older than Clovis were dismissed as misdated. Clovis had American archeology in a stranglehold; James Adovasio of Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania calls its defenders the "Clovis mafia."

The small band of hunter-gatherers made its summer camp on the riverbank, at the northern end of the

region through which they followed the seasonal game. The location, 45 miles southeast of what is now

Richmond, Va., was ideal: winds from the north kept the flying insects down. Some of the band would

spend their days striking long, slender quartz flakes from stone cores; others made triangular and

pentagonal spear points for the hunt. It was 15,050 years ago; the erstwhile "First Americans" would

not make the trek across the Bering Strait for 3,500 more years.

Now there are too many skeletons in the closet to ignore. Pushed by a 1990 federal law that requires museums to return Native American remains to their tribes, scientists—called in to figure out who belongs to whom—have amassed a database of "craniometric profiles." Each of the 2,000 or so profiles consists of some 90 skull measurements, such as distance between the eyes, that indicate ancestry. For most skeletons, it has been pretty straightforward to tell a Hopi from a Crow. But some skulls stand out like pale-skinned, redheaded cousins at a family reunion of olive-skinned brunettes. The oldest American found so far, an 11,500-year-old skeleton from central Brazil, resembles southern Asians and Australians, anthropologist Walter Neves of the University of So Paulo reported last year. One skull from Lime Creek, Neb., and two from Minnesota—all 7,840 to 8,900 years old—resemble South Asians or Europeans. Some of the other misfits:

Buhl Woman, found in 1989, died 10,600 years ago at the age of 19 or so. "She doesn't fit into any

modern group," says anthropologist Richard Jantz of the University of Tennessee, "but is most similar

to today's Polynesians."