Were humans in the Americas 12,200 years ago?

GOODLAND, Kan. (AP) -- Archaeologists have returned to a dig near the Colorado-Kansas border for a third summer, but this year's dig has taken on new importance. Radiocarbon dating results...showed that mammoth and prehistoric camel bones found at a rural site near Kanorado, about a mile from the Colorado border, dated back to 12,200 years ago.

That would mean people who once camped at the site may have arrived in the Great Plains 700 years before historians previously thought.

The bones appear to have tool marks made by humans, who probably broke them to extract marrow for food or to make tools, said Steve Holen, curator of archaeology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

A funny thing about some archaeologists is that they think lack of evidence is the same thing as evidence for absence. Just because the earliest sites found go back only 11,500 years is no evidence no one was here before that. The idea that the earliest site ever found (decades ago) is necessarily the oldest ever is just plain silly.

But workers at the site would be thrilled to find evidence to push back the dates humans arrived in the Great Plains.

If such an artifact was found, the researchers say, it would raise questions about whether the earliest inhabitants of North America came across the Bering Strait from Asia. Instead, they may have arrived by boat in South America and journeyed northward.

I wish the reporter had explained that last bit. So far as I know there is no evidence whatsoever for people being in Polynesia or Micronesia anywhere near that early (I know, I know: absence of evidence, etc, but that is a big absence), and without Polynesia as a jumping off spot there is no way people made it from Melanesia or Indonesia to South America in boats. Nor was there any suggestion about why ppl would pass up Polynesia and keep driving on to South America, since they didn't know it was there.

Perhaps ppl moved from Siberia thru Alaska and down the coast all the way to southern South America before they ventured inland into North America, but that doesn't seem to be what the AP is suggesting. It may of course just be a small bit of mis-reporting by a generalist journo. The NYTimes has the story.