I just saw Nova on PBS. This one was about a big dig in Colorado where they found a lot of mammoths and mastodons. Most of them were at a great depth and about 100,000 years old. However there was one at lesser depth buried in mud. The mud dated at 40,000 years old. The big excitement about the find was that the bones were mixed with some boulders, which they couldn't explain in that context. They just couldn't figure out how the boulders got into that location, since there was no place handy for them to have come from. So they started casting around and came up with a known fact. If you have a dead elephant (or equivalent) one way to store it until you can get around to eating it is to push it out into a lake and weigh it down with some boulders. People have been known to do this very thing, it is a recognized activity. Then they found one of the bones which looked as if it had cut marks on it, as if it had been butchered with stone tools. This definitely got them excited.
The best guess for the first people in the Americas is about 15,000 years ago. I have seen reports claiming as long as 30,000 years, or maybe a little over. There has never been a claim of 40,000 years. So if this turned out to be true it would be a major upset to current ideas about the peopling of the Americas.
I am going to join the group that has some serious doubts about their findings. But I suppose it could be possible. After all modern humans entered Europe around 40,000 years ago, and Australia possibly even earlier. So there is nothing to have positively prevented them from coming into the Americas at about the same time.
Bill Gill
