Archaeology: New Ways to The New World

An old Virginia sandpit may change our views of the earliest Americans

It is the Americas' epic immigration saga, long taught in schools and enshrined in popular books. At the end of the last Ice Age about 12,000 years ago, brave Siberians walked across the Bering Sea land bridge, then edged their way south via a newly opened corridor in the ice and fanned out in all directions. Within 500 years, their descendants had settled most of the hemisphere, from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America. Alas, as archaeologists have learned by digging up and down the Americas, this engaging tale may be wrong.

The latest evidence against the old...

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