Early Footprints Kick Up a Storm
Human occupation of the Americas is not supposed to be much older than 12,000 years. A spear point found in mammoth remains in 1932 has long been the earliest solid evidence of humans living in the New World. The find was rigorously dated to about 11,200 years ago and came from a culture called the Clovis. In 1977 anthropologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee found the remains of a human settlement at Monte Verde, Chile, that was at least 1,000 years older.
Since then, mounds of disputed evidence have been unearthed, from Pennsylvania to the Amazon, in the search for signs that someone got here even earlier. The latest and most controversial candidate surfaced when a team of investigators led by Sylvia Gonzalez of Liverpool John Moores University in England announced in August the discovery in central Mexico of human footprints that ...
