Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

uncomfortable to read the publications from this period (I cite a
number of them in the endnotes for this section, so you can see
for yourself). It’s clear that there was a lot more at stake than
just the evidence.
I’m certainly not an archaeologist, so I cannot fairly evaluate
either the critiques or the rebuttals. It’s clear that the critics of
the site wholeheartedly believe that the dates are flawed. But
looking back on this period from a future in which we have many
candidates for pre-Clovis, it is also hard to avoid the impression
that Adovasio was fully vindicated.
Meadowcroft was arguably a victim of the Clovis First
dogma. Its discovery in the 1970s predated the discovery of
other pre-Clovis sites, making it seem like an outlier, reinforcing
doubts about it. Now that quite a few sites are accepted as pre-
Clovis, including the Cactus Hill (Virginia), the Paisley Caves
(Oregon), and the Buttermilk Creek (Texas) sites,
Meadowcroft’s pre-Clovis layers seem even more difficult to
dismiss. A reexamination and additional dates with more refined
methods of today would probably yield more information and
more confidence in the results of the site, but Adovasio is
adamant that he’s done enough; the evidence he gathered
should speak for itself (14).
I also learned in class that during the 1980s, linguistic evidence,
morphological evidence, and very early genetics evidence were integrated
into the traditional model, producing an extremely popular synthesis called
the three-wave migration hypothesis. This model divided all Native
Americans into three groups based on language groupings (“Amerind,”
“Na-Dene,” and “Inuit-Aleut vii ”), each of which entered the Americas
separately and sequentially. It was the so-called Amerinds who were
descended from the Clovis peoples, with the other groups entering later.
(See “The Rise and Fall of the Three-wave Migration Hypothesis” sidebar.)
A few years after taking this class, now a newly accepted graduate student,