SD man has scientists rethinking old Americans

In case you missed it, and I don’t know how you could have, a fossil discovered in San Diego has yielded potentially groundbreaking evidence suggesting that North America had human inhabitants more than 100,000 years earlier than previously thought.

It turns out that the lead author of the paper published in Nature announcing this discovery is the director of research at the Center for American Paleolithic Research, based in Hot Springs, SD.  His name is Steven R. Holen.

Holen’s peer-reviewed article in Nature is available at this link.

A separate (dumbed down for English majors) news article in Nature is here: Controversial study claims humans reached Americas 100,000 years earlier than thought

Their contention, if correct, would force a dramatic rethink of when and how the Americas were first settled — and who by. Most scientists subscribe to the view that Homo sapiens arrived in North America less than 20,000 years ago. The latest study raises the possibility that another hominin species, such as Neanderthals or a group known as Denisovans, somehow made it from Asia to North America before that and flourished.

“It’s such an amazing find and — if it’s genuine — it’s a game-changer. It really does shift the ground completely,” says John McNabb, a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK. “I suspect there will be a lot of reaction to the paper, and most of it is not going to be acceptance.”