It makes zero sense to think that the America’s were not populated around the same time as the rest of the world. I think if you could cut down the jungles of South America you would find a LOT of evidence of human life dating back thousands of years.
This was during the last ice age. The coasts were much different. The people probably reached south of the glaciers by boats, moving along the coast.
Most of the population was probably along the coasts, and the sites are under hundreds of feet of water.
True. Some have already been found..............
The issue with the western hemisphere is how did they get across from Asia?
The obvious way is during an ice age when the Bering straits were a forest. This is how horses got from here (they evolved in NAermica but then died out) to there; and how things like mammoths got from there over to here. There have been numerous ice ages, so numerous opportunities.
I am amazed that anyone is surprised by this. And, yes, there are findings in SAmerican mountains of varieties of humans not like what is climbing about now. Extinct varieties.