Until recently archeologists held to a model called Clovis First which posited that the Amerindians were descended from Siberian hunters who swept down from Beringia 13,000 years ago and spread rapidly north to south. Findings such as Monte Verde have thrown a cloud over the cleanliness of this hypothesis and there doesn't seem to be any claimant to the throne at this point. Geneticists have been weighing in on this topic now and then. Roughly, one line of results seems to suggest that the Amerindians have been resident on the New World for far longer than 10,000 years. Another finding has been that the ancestors of the indigenous people went through a massive population bottleneck and subsequent demographic expansion. It doesn't seem like geneticists have yielded results with enough precision to decide the matter, but here is another forthcoming study, New Ideas About Human Migration From Asia To Americas:
"These ...
