Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

meaningful?
Page-Ladson is incredibly important to us precisely because it wasn’t
important. This was just a tiny pond in the middle of nowhere 14,500 years
ago, a nice place for big animals to come have a drink and a rest in the
middle of the hot savanna.
Archaeologically, Page-Ladson is a very sparse site. There’s no evidence
of humans living in the area, no evidence of sustained activity or periodic
visits to the site. Future excavations may change the way we interpret the
site, but right now the flakes and broken knife seem to have been from a
one-time visit, a scenario perhaps not unlike the one I gave at the beginning
of this chapter. (This sparseness makes some archaeologists look askance at
the site, wanting more evidence to be convinced that it’s legitimate.)
The sparseness of Page-Ladson, the isolation of it, is not what
archaeologists expect to see when a group of people moves across a
landscape for the first time. Instead, the pre-Clovis peoples of Page-Ladson
seem to be “settled in” to the region (2).
Page-Ladson does more than indicate people were in the Americas long
before 13,000 years ago—that is pretty well accepted at this point. It helps
to reconcile the genetic and archaeological records by showing that people
had already been well established across the Americas thousands of years
before Clovis. Florida is a long way from either of the two potential paths
that humans might have taken to enter the Americas—through the interior
along the margins of the Rocky Mountains or along the West Coast. It
would have taken time for people to have gotten there and learned the
geography of the region and the distribution of its resources well enough to
have been living so far inland.
In this chapter and the next, we will explore what the genetics says
about how humans got past the ice wall and peopled the continent. We’ll be
covering the history of the Americas from roughly 20,000 years ago
through about 10,000 years ago in this chapter, and the later peopling events
(after 10,000 years ago) in the next chapter.
At this point, I think it’s important to pause and remind ourselves once
again that there are very different perspectives on this period, depending on
which kind of evidence you prioritize. People who prioritize archaeological
evidence from the Page-Ladson site and accept as valid sites like Monte
Verde II in Chile, Paisley Caves in Oregon, and the early sites along