Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2136
SUBJECT: ARCHAEOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
So archaeologists named this culture the Clovis culture after that. And it was for a long while thought to be the first culture, the first human presence in the Americas. And the dating that was put on that was around 13,400 years ago. But this culture crossed the Bering Straits, which were then a land bridge, as you can see from this image on the screen.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Hancock's summary of the historical view is correct: for decades archaeologists treated the Clovis complex as the basal archaeological horizon in North America, that is, the first human presence in the Americas, with populations moving across the Beringia land bridge from Siberia. His figure of about 13,400 years ago sits at the older edge of the conventional calibrated range. Modern high-precision dating narrows the Clovis complex to roughly 13,050 to 12,750 cal yr B.P. (Waters and colleagues), while broader earlier estimates ran up to about 13,300 to 13,400 cal BP. The one dated detail worth flagging is framing rather than error: the Clovis-first model has been overturned, since pre-Clovis sites in North and South America show people were in the Americas well before Clovis, a point Hancock elsewhere makes himself. As a description of the traditional dating and its Beringia-crossing narrative the statement is accurate.