I've read
Ancient Encounters, by the way. I'm not discounting that there were Europeans in the Americas before the Clovis Native Americans showed up. I'm inclined to believe they'd resemble the Basques or, more likely, the Lapps if they made it here, since their most likely migration route would be along the ice shelves across the North Atlantic. This would explain why the otherwise European and Middle Eastern haploid X marker is found in a small number of Native Americans (about 3%) as well as in Finland and in the remains of ancient Basques. But as that 3% suggests, I think it was probably a small population along the Atlantic and not some sort of continent-spanning civilization. I think the larger pre-Clovis population was probably genetically Southeast Asian, related to the Aborigones and/or Ainu.
And who knows if there was even an earlier migration? That's why it's dangerous to play "I was here first and you took my land." Almost no ethnic population now lives where it started out and depending on what year you want to stop at, any number of ethnic groups can make a claim on just about any square foot of land on the planet. Of course I've always wondered if we could make a case that non-Africans were forced out of Africa and deserve "reparations" for the dismal treatment they received some 50-100 thousand years (or more) ago. If one really wants to play "This was my ancestor's land.", considering that everyone came out of Africa, then the colonial Europeans were simply "coming home".
"My amateur guess is that the Western and South American pre-Clovis populations came from the Southeast Asian genetic family and any pre-Clovis Europeans (possibly Lapp-like or Basque-like), if there were any (I'm about 60/40 that there were), were along the Atlantic coast, since there are ancient genetic markers in some Native Americans that are normally considered characteristically "European". Of course it is also possible that the Basques or Lapps did some post-Clovis mixing and that there weren't any ancient Europeans here." My amateur view is very close to yours. I am puzzled by the below statue though.
Statue found by archeologists in an ancient Olmec (1500-300BC) dig.