As far as dating human habitation in the Western Hemisphere, I believe that the closest analogy is how geo-physicist treated plate tectonics until the older scientists finally died out or were convinced. I clearly remember 'settled science' that the earliest paleo-indian populations in the modern US were the Clovis People in New Mexico area about 11,200 BC.
Now we are finding sites like this and others scattered in many US places and down south as far as Chile. Well accepted dates predate Clovis by 1,000+ years and some estimates GREATLY exceed those dates. Something to remember is that it takes TIME to build populations, especially for very scattered nomadic populations.
Having a floor beneath which dates can’t sink isn’t new in American archaeology, or perhaps rather what passes for archaeology. It would be great if the obstacles to acceptance would die off, but I’m not sure it would help. Before Clovis-first-and-only caught on, human antiquity in the Americas was pegged around 1000 BC. Clovis was controversial and even pseudoscientific until the 1950s when RC dating destroyed objections to the dating. Having Clovis as the new floor required that a small group of hunters hustled across Beringia, waiting thousands of years for the ice to melt, then exploded across the landscape, super-hunting megafauna to extinction in order to feed what *had to* be the largest and most rapid population explosion ever documented (even though it has never been in evidence). From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, the single group of immigrants covered two continents so rapidly that the dating can’t be discerned from one to another.