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Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his students on the creation of Kankakee Sand Islands of Northwest Indiana is lending support to evidence that the first humans to settle the Americas came from Europe, a discovery that overturns decades of classroom lessons that nomadic tribes from Asia crossed a Bering Strait land-ice bridge. Valparaiso is a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research.....

Who were the first people in North America? From where did they come? How did they arrive? The prehistory of the Americas has been widely studied. Over 70 years a consensus became so established that dissenters felt uneasy challenging it. Yet in 2001, genetics, anthropology and a few shards of flint combined to overturn the accepted facts and to push back one of the greatest technological changes that the Americas have ever seen by over five millennia. The accepted version of the first Americans starts with a flint spearhead unearthed at Clovis, New Mexico, in 1933. Dated by the mammoth...

'First Americans' may be Johnnies-come-lately By MIKE TONER The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 08/20/04 Human history is being written —and rewritten — a shovelful at a time on a shaded hillside along the Savannah River. Each summer Al Goodyear's team of archaeologists digs deeper into the riverbank in South Carolina's Allendale County. Each summer the story of the first Americans, the primitive hunters who first populated the continent, grows longer. And more complex. And more controversial. David Tulis/AJC (ENLARGE) Archaeologist Al Goodyear holds a hand-made 'microblade,' one of the hundreds of artifacts unearthed during his team's seven years of excavations...

Stone Age Columbus - questions and answersWhat was the Ice Age climate like in southern France/Spain? During the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago the climate was a lot colder and drier than now. In southern France one could expect summer temperatures of between 5-10°C and winter temperatures dropping below -20°C. Even so, there were three basic land types that had their own advantages and disadvantages for people: Wide coastal plain that was probably an open grass land with sparse vegetation Uplands that would have been much like the Arctic tundra today Inland valleys that were well sheltered and...

Skulls found in Mexico suggest the early Americans would have said 'G'day mate' By Steve Connor, Science Editor 04 September 2003 The accepted theory of how prehistoric humans first migrated to America has been challenged by a study of an ancient set of bones unearthed in Mexico. An analysis of 33 skulls found on the Mexican peninsula of Baja California suggests that the first Americans were not north Asians who crossed to the American continent about 12,000 years ago. The skulls more closely resemble the present-day natives of Australia and the South Pacific, suggesting that there might have been an...

On September 19, 1997, the New York Times announced the discovery of a group of earthen mounds in northeastern Louisiana. The site, known as Watson Brake, includes 11 mounds 26 feet high linked by low ridges into an oval 916 feet long. What is remarkable about this massive complex is that it was built around 3400 B.C., more than 3,000 years before the development of farming communities in eastern North America, by hunter-gatherers, at least partly mobile, who visited the site each spring and summer to fish, hunt, and collect freshwater mussels... Social complexity cannot exist unless I it...

As elusive as the Cheshire Cat, the first people to arrive in the Americas have tended to appear and vanish with each new twist in the archaeological record. The latest disappearing act may be taking place on page 501, where new evidence, some claim, casts another shadow over a once-cherished idea: that Asian big-game hunters crossed the Bering Land Bridge to give rise to the Clovis people, who were considered the first Americans. New dates show that a crucial Siberian site, thought to be a way station along the Bering road, wasn't occupied until after the Clovis had begun killing...