Humans arrived in North America 30,000 years ago, study finds
- Limestone tools found in Mexico’s Chiquihuite Cave suggest that people were living in North America as early as about 30,000 years ago
- The new findings contradict the conventional view that the first people arrived in the Americas around 13,000 years ago
Scientists said on Wednesday they had found 1,930 limestone tools, including small flakes and fine blades that may have been used for cutting meat and small points that may have been used as spear tips, indicating human presence at the Chiquihuite Cave in a mountainous region of Mexico’s Zacatecas state.
The tools spanned from 31,000 to 12,500 years old, said archaeologist Ciprian Ardelean of Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas in Mexico, lead author of one of two studies published in the journal Nature. The site was occupied periodically for millennia by nomadic hunter-gatherers.
In the second study, evidence from 42 sites around North America and the location of a land bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska during the last Ice Age indicated human presence dating to at least a time called the Last Glacial Maximum, when ice sheets blanketed much of the continent, about 26,000 to 19,000 years ago and immediately thereafter.
The research also implicated humans in the extinctions of many large Ice Age mammals such as mammoths and camels.
