Reset the timeline 🧵 1/4 In the Proceedings of the Nat'l Acad of Sciences, 2017, Duane Froese (U of Alberta) et al, identified two bison migrations from the eastern hemisphere to the western (based on bison mitogenomes), one from 195k BP (before present) to 135k BP, the 2nd from 45k BP to 21k BP.
2/4 Why would we assume that people couldn't or wouldn't follow these bison 200,000 years ago, or 40,000 years ago? In literally every other context, we understand that early people follow where animals go.
3/4 In 1991, in World Archaeology, Brazilian archeologist Niede Guidon wrote, "Everybody is willing to give humans the abilities necessary for voyaging across to Australia 60k years ago. Why then would it be impossible for them to pass from island to island along the Aleutians, just as one example?
4/4 For reasons that are hard to understand from an objective viewpoint, we start our critique of pre-Clovis human sites in the Americas with the idea that these sites are unlikely to be legitimately as old as the science tells us, when we could start with the idea that they are very likely indeed.