1. Early Human Occupation of the New World

2. Early Human Occupation of the New World
Earliest Evidence
Now thought to be more recent, date was partly contaminated by lignite.
Lewisville
Initial radiocarbon dates >27000BP
Meadowcroft Shelter
Dated over 14,000BP
Southwestern Pennsylvania
Monte Verde
Southern Chile
Dated over 14,000BP

3. Early Human Occupation of the New World
Earliest Well Documented Evidence
Clovis Complex
Throughout the New World, best known in SW United States.
Clovis Fluted Points
Mammoth remains
Carbon dated at ca. 11,500BP
Folsom Complex
Folsom Fluted Points
Associated with now extinct bison
Carbon dated at ca. 10,000 BP

4. Early Human Occupation of the New World
Kennewick Man - ????????
On July 28, 1996, two men watching the annual hydro boat races at Columbia Park in Kennewick, Washington, accidentally found part of a human skull on the bottom of the Columbia River about ten feet from shore. Later, deliberate searches turned up a nearly complete male skeleton that is now known as Kennewick Man.

5. Early Human Occupation of the New World
Conventional archeology has held to the Bering theory.
  But according to a new theory first proposed by Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley, the continent's first inhabitants may have crossed the Atlantic slightly more than 18,000 years ago from the Iberian Peninsula - the area that encompasses Spain, Portugal and southwestern France. Belonging to a group known as the Solutreans, the pre-modern explorers are believed to have originally settled along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, according to the researchers. Over the next six millennia, their hunting and gathering culture may have spread as far as the American deserts and Canadian tundra, and perhaps into South America.