Yup.
The early explorers/gold miners in Alaska were amazed to find what has been called “muck”.
Hard pack of mud, plant debris, and bones, mashed together and mixed up like it had gone through a cosmic blender.
More and more evidence to support the theory that there was some kind of cataclysmic event, maybe not worldwide, but a large part of it focused on northern North America, that coincided with the beginning of the end of the last ice age.
There were also linguistic studies in North America that suggested that NorthAm languages were a subset of South American languages, due to greater language diversity in the South American continent.
Yet North America was settled first.
This scenario gives another answer. There were lots of people in North America, but many of the North Americans (and their languages) were wiped out 13000 years ago. The surviving South American populations were thus larger as well as over a greater area, allowing their linguistic diversity to continue to increase.
This may also explain why the oldest mitrochondrial DNA on the continent is the Pacific Northwest. Lots of mountains to protect you from the asteroid strike, and ocean food sources that make the land extinctions less likely to make the people extinct.