(September 27, 2011 at 10:16 pm)Minimalist Wrote: There is a little more to it than that, Chuck. There is a very fine book out called "The First Americans" by Chris Hardaker. Among his discussions he takes the time to outline a number of examples of career suicide or threats of career suicide against people who dared to question the establishment's Clovis-First paradigm.
It's sobering and a great example of what happens when science becomes dogmatic like religion. Anything needs to be questioned...freely and often.
Genetic and linguistic evidence does not seem to strongly back Clovis first. They have been interpreted to suggest 3 pulses of migration into America. One quite ancient, maybe 30,000 years ago, and leaving islated gene population and linguistic descendants mainly in southern part of south America, the second corresponding roughly to Clovis, entering America around 12,000 years ago and making up the dominant gene and language source of almost all of native Americas from northern Canada to southern part of chile, while a third entered northern Canada and Greenland much more recently, around 5,000 years ago, and leaving genetic and linguistic evidence mainly in those regions.
