RADIOCARBON, Vol 44, Nr 2, 2002, p 407–436 © 2002 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona INITIAL HUMAN COLONIZATION OF THE AMERICAS: AN OVERVIEW OF THE ISSUES AND THE EVIDENCE Stuart J Fiedel The Louis Berger Group, 1819 H Street, NW, Suite 900, Washington, DC 20006 USA. Email:
[email protected]. INTRODUCTION Out of Asia, But When? Ever since José de Acosta’s prescient speculation, in 1590, that Native Americans were descended from “savage hunters” who had followed game animals across a land bridge from northeastern Asia into northwestern America (Acosta 1604), most serious scholars have assumed that this was the migration route. The main point of dispute has been the date when the ancestral Asians made the crossing. After many nineteenth-century claims of the discovery of stone tools or bones of “early man” failed to withstand scientific scrutiny, a conservative reaction set in, embodied by the hyper- skeptical Αλε Ηρδλικα of the Smithsonian Institution. Ηρδλικα dismissed all claims of a human presence in the Americas prior to about 5000 years ago. However, in 1926, obviously man-made spearpoints were found embedded within the skeletons of extinct giant bison, near Folsom, New Mexico. Prominent scholars viewed the finds in-situ in 1927 and 1928, and verified the coexistence of humans (“Paleoindians”) and giant mammals (megafauna) that died out at the end of the Ice Age, then estimated as about 10,000 years ago. Within the next decade, similar, but not identical points were found alongside the bones of mam- moths at Dent, Colorado, and at Blackwater Draw, near Clovis, New Mexico (Cotter 1937).