Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

Figuring out how that finding fits with genetic evidence is a new puzzle to
solve. But I think that while we exercise a healthy skepticism, we must
learn our lessons from the erroneous Clovis First paradigm and not simply
dismiss evidence because it doesn’t fit with a model we happen to favor
(49)—we shouldn’t simply replace Clovis First with a similarly dogmatic
upper limit. All scientists must hold themselves open to the possibility that
we could be wrong, and it may very well be that in 5, 10, or 20 years, this
book will be as out of date as any other. That possibility is what makes
working in this field so rewarding.
Footnotes
i In both the television series and the book A Song of Ice and Fire, the Wall
is described as being almost 700 feet high.
ii Archaeologists David Kilby and J. M. Adovasio have both confirmed my
impression that the archaeological literature up until the 1990s recognized
women as having been around, but they didn’t really get discussed or
considered as part of the theory because they obviously neither made nor
used stone tools. Nuanced discussions of women in the past became more
common beginning in the 1990s. Other archaeologists I have spoken with
dispute that women were omitted from study, but they were just not
specifically studied.
iii I dislike both of these terms, but they are the ones historically used by
archaeologists to describe this period.
iv They described the hypothesis that humans had caused the extinction of
the giant Pleistocene beasts as the Overkill hypothesis. It’s not necessarily a
part of the Clovis First hypothesis, but it has become associated with the
interior route because it fit with the idea of a wave of big-game hunters
moving swiftly across the landscape. This hypothesis, first proposed by
Paul Martin in 1973, is still hotly debated; many archaeologists and
paleoecologists argue that the changing climate at the end of the Pleistocene
was more of a factor in the extinction of the megafauna, and that the
archaeological record shows only some megafauna were hunted by humans,
not all. To this argument some add the critique that ancient Native
American hunter-gatherers were far more responsible hunters and stewards