First Americans: Pre-Clovis Projectiles Hint At Multiple Migrations

By Gemma Tarlach
Oct 24, 2018 6:00 PMOct 7, 2019 7:45 PM
A 15,000-year-old projectile of the stemmed point tradition. (Credit: Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University)
A 15,000-year-old projectile may provide indirect evidence for how and when people first arrived in the Americas. (Credit: Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University)

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Thousands of artifacts from a site in Central Texas, including a dozen projectile points, have provided researchers with new clues about the arrival and spread of First Americans on the continent. The items, which are up to 15,500 years old, hint that the Americas may have been populated in multiple waves of migration via different routes.

In the long-simmering debate over when and how humans arrived in the Americas, there are few things researchers can agree on. Paleogenetic studies have confirmed the First Americans arrived from Asia, but the timing, the route and how they spread across the continents remain contested.

Archaeologists have looked for answers in the stone tools these early explorers left behind, but even there, definitive evidence is scant.

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