From school years, everyone knows that America was settled by Asians who moved there in small groups across the Bering Isthmus (at the site of the current strait). They settled in the New World after a huge glacier began to melt 14-15 thousand years ago. However, recent discoveries by archaeologists and geneticists have shaken this coherent theory. It turns out that America was settled more than once, it was done by some strange peoples, related almost to the Australians, and besides, it is not clear on what transport the first "Indians" reached the extreme south of the New World. Lenta.ru tried to figure out the mysteries of the settlement of America.
First went
Until the end of the 20th century, the “Clovis first” hypothesis dominated American anthropology, according to which it was this culture of ancient mammoth hunters that appeared 12.5-13.5 thousand years ago that was the most ancient in the New World. According to this hypothesis, people who got to Alaska could survive on ice-free land, because there was quite a bit of snow, but then the path to the south was blocked by glaciers until a period of 14-16 thousand years ago, due to which settlement in the Americas began only after the end of the last glaciation.
The hypothesis was coherent and logical, but in the second half of the 20th century some discoveries were made that were incompatible with it. In the 1980s, Tom Dillehay, during excavations in Monte Verde (southern Chile), found that people had been there at least 14.5 thousand years ago. This caused a strong reaction from the scientific community: it turned out that the discovered culture was 1.5 thousand years older than Clovis in North America.
Most American anthropologists simply denied the find scientific validity. Already during the excavations, Delai faced a powerful attack on his professional reputation, it came to the closure of funding for excavations and attempts to declare Monte Verde a phenomenon that was not related to archeology. Only in 1997 did he manage to confirm the dating at 14,000 years, which caused a deep crisis in understanding the ways of settling America. At that time, there were no places of such ancient settlement in North America, which raised the question of where exactly people could get to Chile.
Recently, the Chileans suggested that Delea continue excavations. Influenced by the sad experience of twenty years of excuses, he initially refused. "I was fed up" - explained his position as a scientist. However, in the end he agreed and found tools at the MVI site, undoubtedly man-made, whose antiquity was 14.5-19 thousand years.
History repeated itself: archaeologist Michael Waters immediately questioned the findings. In his opinion, the finds can be simple stones, remotely similar to tools, which means that the traditional chronology of the settlement of America is still out of danger.
Photo: Tom Dillehay / Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University
Seaside nomads
To understand how justified the criticism of the new work, we turned to the anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky (Moscow State University). According to him, the tools found are indeed very primitive (processed on one side), but made from materials that are not found in Monte Verde. Quartz for a significant part of them had to be brought from afar, that is, such items cannot be of natural origin.
The scientist noted that the systematic criticism of discoveries of this kind is quite understandable: "When you teach in school and university that America was inhabited in a certain way, it is not so easy to give up this point of view."
Image: Yukon Beringia Interpretive Center
The conservatism of American researchers is also understandable: in North America, the recognized finds date back thousands of years after the period indicated by Delea. And what about the theory that before the melting of the glacier, the ancestors of the Indians blocked by it could not settle south?
However, Drobyshevsky notes, there is nothing supernatural in the more ancient dates of the Chilean sites. The islands along Canada's present-day Pacific coast were not glaciated, and bear remains from the Ice Age have been found there. This means that people could well spread along the coast, swimming across in boats and not going deep into the then inhospitable North America.
Australian footprint
However, the fact that the first reliable finds of the ancestors of the Indians were made in Chile does not end with the oddities of the settlement of America. Not so long ago, it turned out that the genes of the Aleuts and groups of Brazilian Indians have features characteristic of the genes of the Papuans and Australian Aborigines. As the Russian anthropologist emphasizes, the data of geneticists are well combined with the results of the analysis of skulls previously found in South America and having features close to Australian ones. In his opinion, most likely, the Australian trace in South America is associated with a common ancestral group, part of which moved to Australia tens of thousands of years ago, while the other migrated along the coast of Asia to the north, up to Beringia, and from there reached the South American continent. .
As if that wasn't enough, 2013 genetic studies showed that the Brazilian Botakudo Indians are close in mitochondrial DNA to the Polynesians and part of the inhabitants of Madagascar. Unlike the Australoids, the Polynesians could well have reached South America by sea. At the same time, traces of their genes in eastern Brazil, and not on the Pacific coast, are not so easy to explain. It turns out that a small group of Polynesian navigators, for some reason, did not return after landing, but overcame the Andean highlands, which were unusual for them, in order to settle in Brazil. One can only guess about the motives for such a long and difficult overland journey for typical sailors.
So, a small part of the American natives have traces of genes that are very far from the genome of the rest of the Indians, which contradicts the idea of a single group of ancestors from Beringia.
good old
However, there are more radical deviations from the idea of settling America in one wave and only after the melting of the glacier. In the 1970s, the Brazilian archaeologist Nieda Guidon discovered the cave site of Pedra Furada (Brazil), where, in addition to primitive tools, there were many bonfires, the age of which radiocarbon analysis showed from 30 to 48 thousand years. It is easy to understand that such figures caused great rejection by North American anthropologists. The same Deley criticized radiocarbon dating, noting that traces could remain after a fire of natural origin. Gidon reacted sharply to such opinions of her colleagues from the United States in Latin American: “Fire of natural origin cannot arise deep in a cave. American archaeologists need to write less and dig more.”
Drobyshevsky emphasizes that although no one has yet been able to challenge the dating of the Brazilians, the doubts of the Americans are quite understandable. If people were in Brazil 40 thousand years ago, then where did they go then and where are the traces of their stay in other parts of the New World?
Image: USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory
The history of mankind knows cases when the first colonizers of new lands almost completely died out, leaving no significant traces. This is what happened to Homo sapiens who settled in Asia. Their first traces there date back to the period up to 125 thousand years ago, however, genetic data say that all of humanity came from a population that left Africa much later - only 60 thousand years ago. There is a hypothesis that the reason for this could be the extinction of the then Asian part as a result of the eruption of the Toba volcano 70 thousand years ago. The energy of this event is considered to exceed the combined yield of all the combined nuclear weapons ever created by mankind.
However, even an event more powerful than a nuclear war is difficult to explain the disappearance of significant human populations. Some researchers note that neither Neanderthals, nor Denisovans, nor even Homo floresiensis, who lived relatively close to Toba, died out from the explosion. And judging by individual finds in South India, local Homo sapiens did not die out at that time, traces of which are not observed in the genes of modern people for some reason. Thus, the question of where the people who settled 40 thousand years ago in South America could have gone remains open and to some extent casts doubt on the most ancient finds of the Pedra Furada type.
Genetics vs genetics
Not only archaeological data often come into conflict, but also such seemingly reliable evidence as genetic markers. This summer, the Maanasa Raghavan group from the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen announced that the data of genetic analysis refute the idea that more than one wave of ancient settlers participated in the settlement of America. According to them, genes close to Australians and Papuans appeared in the New World later than 9,000 years ago, when America was already inhabited by immigrants from Asia.
To share with friends: It has long been believed that the New World was settled by mammoth hunters who moved from Asia to North America 12 thousand years ago. They walked along a land or ice bridge in the Bering Strait, which at that distant time connected two continents. However, this already well-established scheme of colonization of the New World is collapsing as a result of the latest sensational finds by archaeologists. Some researchers even express the seditious idea that the very first Americans could well have been ... Europeans.kennewick man
A person with a similar face can be found in any Russian city. And for no one this type will cause either surprise or memories of overseas countries. Nevertheless, before us is a reconstruction of the face of one of the first Americans, the so-called Kennewick man.
When, on July 28, 1996, James Chatters, an independent forensic archaeologist, was invited to examine a human skeleton found in the shallows of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington, USA, he did not expect that he would become the author of a sensational discovery. At first, Chatters thought it was the remains of a 19th-century European hunter, because the skull clearly did not belong to a Native American. However, with the help of radiocarbon analysis, it was possible to establish the age of the remains - 9000 years! Who was the Kennewick man with distinctly European features, and how did he get to the New World? Archaeologists in many countries are still scratching their heads over these questions.
If such a find were the only one, one could consider it anomalous and forget about it, as scientists often do with strange artifacts that do not fit into their schemes. But skeletons of people, strikingly different from the remains of American Indians, began to come across more and more often. Suffice it to say that in an analysis of nearly a dozen skulls of early Americans, anthropologists found only two that showed features characteristic of North Asians or Native American Indians.
Everything was much earlier!
The old scheme of colonization of the New World by mammoth hunters from Asia, who moved to North America via a land bridge, which, due to low sea levels (glaciers were just beginning to melt) existed in the Bering Strait, began to burst at the seams. This was facilitated by more accurate methods for determining the age of archaeological finds.
The study of ancient remains continues
Previously, conservative archaeologists did not want to hear about such finds, whose age exceeded 12 thousand years. The fact is that during the ice age, the New World was fenced off from Asia for a long time by huge masses of ice that blocked Alaska and northern Canada. It is unlikely that ancient people would have ventured on a long journey through the glaciers, where there was neither food nor the opportunity for at least a short rest. In this icy desert, inevitable death awaited anyone. Only about 12 thousand years ago, according to scientists, the glaciers retreated, making it possible for people to move from Asia to the New World. However, archaeologist R. McNash from Boston University back in the 1980s said: the hypothesis that a person crossed the Bering Strait only 12 thousand years ago should be recognized as untenable, since there are traces of much more ancient migrations in South America. Even then, in the cave of Piaui (Brazil), stone tools aged 18 thousand years were discovered, and in Venezuela they found a spearhead stuck in the bone of a mastodon 16 thousand years ago. 
In the cave of Piaui
The finds of recent years have confirmed R. McNash's seditious statement at the time. Modern methods of radiocarbon determination of the age of artifacts made it possible in some cases to correct the previously stated figures for many ancient settlements. Southern Chile is the most interesting place, which makes scientists think about correcting the old hypothesis.
Here, in Monte Verde, a real camp of ancient Americans was discovered. Hundreds of stone and bone tools, remains of grain, nuts, fruits, crayfish, bones of birds and animals, fragments of huts and hearths - all this is 12.5 thousand years old. Monte Verde is located at a great distance from the Bering Strait, and it is unlikely that people could have reached here so quickly, based on the old scheme for colonizing the New World. Archaeologist Dillihey, who is excavating in Monte Verde, believes that this settlement may be much older. He recently discovered charcoal and stone tools in a 30,000-year-old layer.
Some intrepid archaeologists, putting their reputation on the line, claim to have unearthed much older settlements of early Americans than Clovis in New Mexico, which is still thought to be the oldest. In the mid-1980s, archaeologist N. Gidon published his evidence that the drawings in the cave of Pedra Furada (Brazil) are 17 thousand years old, and stone tools - up to 32 thousand years.
Mysteries of ancient skulls
The latest researches of anthropologists are also interesting, which can be translated into the language of mathematics with the help of special computer programs. This applies to differences in the forms of skulls of literally all peoples of the world. Comparison of skulls, known as craniometric analysis, can now be used to trace the ancestry of a particular population group. Anthropologist Doug Ouseley and his colleague Richard Jantz have devoted 20 years to craniometric studies of modern American Indians. But when they examined a number of skulls of the most ancient North Americans, they, to their considerable surprise, did not find the similarity that they expected. Anthropologists have been struck by how many ancient skulls differed from any modern Native American groups. Reconstructions of the appearance of the ancient Americans more resembled the inhabitants of, say, Indonesia or even Europe. Some of the skulls could be "attributed" to people from South Asia and Australia, and a 9400-year-old caveman skull, recovered from a cave in Western Nevada, most of all resembled the skull of the ancient Ainu (Japan).
Where did these people with elongated heads and narrow faces come from? After all, they are not the ancestors of modern Indians. These questions are now worrying many scientists.
Why did they disappear?
Perhaps representatives of different peoples colonized America, and this process stretched out in time. In the end, in the "battle" for the New World, one ethnic group survived or won, which became the progenitor of modern Indians. The first Americans with elongated skulls may have been exterminated or assimilated with other waves of migrants, or they may have died out from famine or epidemics.
A curious hypothesis is that even Europeans could have been the first Americans. While this assumption is supported by weak evidence, but still they are. Firstly, this is the completely European appearance of some ancient Americans, secondly, the features found in their DNA that are characteristic only of Europeans, and thirdly ... Archaeologist Dennis Stanford, who studied the technology of making stone tools in the ancient Clovis site, decided look for a similar one in other parts of the world. In Siberia, Canada and Alaska, he found nothing of the kind. But he found similar stone tools in... Spain. Especially the spearheads resembled the tools of the Solutrean culture, which was common in Western Europe in the period of 24-16.5 thousand years ago. 
The path by which mammoth hunters came to the Americas is still unknown.
In the 1970s, a maritime hypothesis for the colonization of the New World was proposed. Archaeological finds in Australia, Melanesia and Japan indicate that people in coastal areas used boats as early as 25,000 to 40,000 years ago. D. Stanford believes that the currents in the ancient ocean could significantly speed up the transatlantic voyage. Perhaps some of the first Americans came to the continent by accident. They, for example, could be carried away by storms. It is also assumed that Europeans were quite capable of rowing along the edge of the ice bridge that connected England, Iceland, Greenland and North America during the Ice Age. True, it is not yet clear how successful such a trip could be without suitable sites on the coast for stops and rest.
It is possible that the New World was colonized a very long time ago, but in what way, scientists have yet to establish. Perhaps the previously proposed scheme for settling the New World through the Bering Strait 12 thousand years ago corresponded to the second most massive wave of migration, which, having swept across the continent, "left overboard" the very first conquerors of America.
English colonization of North America.
Difficulties of the first settlers.
Reasons for the colonization of America by Europeans. Relocation conditions.
The first Negro slaves.
Mayflower Compact (1620).
Active expansion of European colonization.
Anglo-Dutch Confrontation in America (1648-1674).
Map of the European colonization of North America in the XVI-XVII centuries.
Map of the expeditions of the discoverers of America (1675-1800).
English colonization of North America. The first English settlement in America appeared in 1607 in Virginia and was named Jamestown. The trading post, founded by members of the crews of three English ships under the command of Captain K. Newport, served at the same time as an outpost on the path of the Spanish advance to the north of the continent. The first years of the existence of Jamestown were a time of endless disasters and hardships: diseases, famine and Indian raids took the lives of more than 4 thousand of the first English settlers of America. But already at the end of 1608, the first ship sailed to England, on board of which there was a cargo of wood and iron ore. In just a few years, Jamestown turned into a prosperous village thanks to the extensive plantations of tobacco previously cultivated only by the Indians laid there in 1609, which by 1616 became the main source of income for the inhabitants. Tobacco exports to England, which in 1618 amounted to 20 thousand pounds in monetary terms, increased by 1627 to half a million pounds, creating the necessary economic conditions for population growth. The influx of colonists was greatly facilitated by the allocation of a 50-acre plot of land to any applicant who had the financial means to pay a small rent. Already by 1620 the population of the village was approx. 1000 people, and in all of Virginia there were approx. 2 thousand people. In the 80s. 17th century exports of tobacco from two southern colonies - Virginia and Maryland (1) rose to 20 million pounds.
Difficulties of the first settlers. The virgin forests, which stretched for more than two thousand kilometers along the entire Atlantic coast, abounded with everything necessary for the construction of dwellings and ships, and the rich nature satisfied the needs of the colonists for food. The increasingly frequent calls of European ships into the natural bays of the coast provided them with goods that were not produced in the colonies. The products of their labor were exported to the Old World from the same colonies. But the rapid development of the northeastern lands, and even more so the advancement into the interior of the continent, beyond the Appalachian mountains, was hampered by the lack of roads, impenetrable forests and mountains, as well as the dangerous neighborhood with Indian tribes hostile to aliens.
The fragmentation of these tribes and the complete lack of unity in their sorties against the colonists became the main reason for the displacement of the Indians from the lands they occupied and their final defeat. The temporary alliances of some Indian tribes with the French (in the north of the continent) and with the Spaniards (in the south), who were also worried about the pressure and energy of the British, Scandinavians and Germans advancing from the east coast, did not bring the desired results. The first attempts to conclude peace agreements between individual Indian tribes and the English colonists who settled in the New World turned out to be ineffective (2).
Reasons for the colonization of America by Europeans. Relocation conditions. European immigrants were attracted to America by the rich natural resources of the distant continent, which promised rapid material prosperity, and its remoteness from European strongholds of religious dogmas and political predilections (3). Not supported by governments or official churches of any country, the exodus of Europeans to the New World was financed by private companies and individuals, driven primarily by an interest in generating income from the transportation of people and goods. Already in 1606, the London and Plymouth companies were formed in England, which actively engaged in the development of the northeast coast of America, including the delivery of English colonists to the continent. Numerous immigrants traveled to the New World with families and even entire communities at their own expense. A significant part of the new arrivals were young women, whose appearance was met with sincere enthusiasm by the unmarried male population of the colonies, paying the cost of their "transportation" from Europe at the rate of 120 pounds of tobacco per head.
Huge, hundreds of thousands of hectares, plots of land were allocated by the British crown to the representatives of the English nobility as a gift or for a nominal fee. Interested in the development of their new property, the English aristocracy advanced large sums for the delivery of their recruited compatriots and their arrangement on the lands received. Despite the extreme attractiveness of the conditions existing in the New World for newly arriving colonists, during these years there was a clear lack of human resources, primarily for the reason that only a third of the ships and people embarking on a dangerous journey - two a third died on the way. The new land was not distinguished by hospitality either, meeting the colonists with unusual frosts for Europeans, harsh natural conditions and, as a rule, the hostile attitude of the Indian population.
The first Negro slaves. At the end of August 1619, a Dutch ship arrived in Virginia, bringing the first black Africans to America, twenty of whom were immediately bought by the colonists as servants. Negroes began to turn into lifelong slaves, and in the 60s. 17th century slave status in Virginia and Maryland became hereditary. The slave trade became a regular feature of commercial transactions between East Africa and the American colonies. African chieftains readily traded their men for textiles, household items, gunpowder, and weapons imported from New England (4) and the American South.
Mayflower Compact (1620). In December 1620, an event took place that went down in American history as the beginning of the purposeful colonization of the continent by the British - the Mayflower ship arrived on the Atlantic coast of Massachusetts with 102 Calvinist Puritans, who were rejected by the traditional Anglican Church and did not later find sympathy in Holland. These people, who called themselves Pilgrims (5), considered the only way to preserve their religion to move to America. While still aboard a ship crossing the ocean, they entered into an agreement between themselves, called the Mayflower Compact. It reflected in the most general form the ideas of the first American colonists about democracy, self-government and civil liberties. These notions were developed later in similar agreements reached by the colonists of Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, and in later documents of American history, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America. Having lost half the members of their community, but surviving in a land they had not yet explored in the harsh conditions of the first American winter and the crop failure that followed, the colonists set an example for their compatriots and other Europeans, who arrived in the New World already prepared for the hardships that awaited them.
Active expansion of European colonization. After 1630, at least a dozen small towns arose in Plymouth Colony, the first New England colony that later became the colony of Massachusetts Bay, in which the newly arrived English Puritans settled. Immigration wave 1630-1643 Delivered to New England approx. 20 thousand people, at least 45 thousand more, chose the colonies of the American South or the islands of Central America for their residence.
Over the course of 75 years after the appearance in 1607 on the territory of the modern United States of the first English colony of Virginia, 12 more colonies arose - New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Northern Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The credit for founding them did not always belong to subjects of the British crown. In 1624, on the island of Manhattan in Hudson Bay [named after the English captain G. Hudson (Hudson), who discovered it in 1609, was in the Dutch service], Dutch fur traders founded a province called New Netherland, with the main city of New Amsterdam. The land on which this city developed was bought in 1626 by a Dutch colonist from the Indians for $24. The Dutch never managed to achieve any significant socio-economic development of their only colony in the New World.
Anglo-Dutch Confrontation in America (1648-1674). After 1648 and up to 1674, England and Holland fought three times, and during these 25 years, in addition to hostilities, there was a continuous and fierce economic struggle between them. In 1664, New Amsterdam was captured by the British under the command of the king's brother Duke of York, who renamed the city New York. During the Anglo-Dutch War of 1673-1674. The Netherlands managed to restore their power in this territory for a short time, but after the defeat of the Dutch in the war, the British again took possession of it. From then until the end of the American Revolution in 1783 from r. Kennebec to Florida, from New England to the Lower South, the Union Jack flew over the entire northeast coast of the continent.
(1) The new British colony was named by King Charles I in honor of his wife Henrietta Maria (Mary), sister of Louis XIII of France.
(2) The first of these treaties was concluded only in 1621 between the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Wampanoag Indian tribe.
(3) Unlike most Englishmen, Irishmen, Frenchmen, and even Germans, who were forced to move to the New World primarily by political and religious oppression in their homeland, Scandinavian settlers were attracted to North America primarily by its unlimited economic opportunities.
(4) This region of the northeastern part of the continent was first mapped in 1614 by Captain J. Smith, who gave it the name "New England."
(5) From Italian. peltegrino- literal, foreigner. Wandering pilgrim, pilgrim, wanderer.
Sources.
Ivanyan E.A. History of the USA. M., 2006.
"Canada" - The volume of falling water reaches 5700 or more m? / s. Ottawa. Ottawa is the capital of Canada. Fauna. It borders the USA, Denmark and France. Area - 9984 thousand square meters. km. (second place in the world). Until 1855 it was called Bytown. Heather, sedge, shrub birch and willow grow here. These include the Notre Dame mountains, the Shikshok massif, the Kibkid mountains.
"Discovery of North America" - Negroids. Mongoloids. Mulattos. Population. Caucasians. Key dates of geographical discoveries in America. People from Europe and Africa. Eskimos. Metis. The past. Traveling North America. Indigenous. Sambo. Indians. History of discovery and research.
"Mainland North America" - Task: determine the average July temperature for all climatic zones. The Cordilleras are rich in both sedimentary and igneous minerals. Christopher Columbus - Bahamas and Antilles, Caribbean Sea. In summer, the temperature depends on the latitude of the area and increases when moving from north to south.
"North America Geography" - "Guiana Triangle". dominant religions. Hinduism, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism. Latin America. Northern part of the USA. Catholicism, Protestantism. Colonization - development Colonists - settlers. Mesoamerica. The name of the subregion. Traditional beliefs, Protestantism. Geography of cultures of modern America.
"North America" - The peoples and countries of North America. Most of the residents speak English. The large Mackenzie River belongs to the Arctic Ocean basin. West. The Colorado River belongs to the Pacific Ocean. The cave contains underground rivers connected to the Green River system. In Canada - in English and French, in Mexico and Central America - mainly in Spanish.
Natural Areas of North America - Working with the Geo 7 Disk 1. Open the Geo 7 folder on your desktop. Determine the geographical location of natural areas. Main content: Climate. Author: teacher of geography of the municipal educational institution "Poyarkovskaya secondary school No. 2" Gladchenko G.V. Tundra-marsh. Group work. Wolverine, skunk, raccoon, gray squirrel. Soils. Chestnut chernozems.
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From the school bench we are told that America settled by the inhabitants of Asia, who moved there in groups through the Bering Isthmus (in the place where the strait is now). They settled in the New World after a huge glacier began to melt 14-15 thousand years ago. Did the indigenous population of America really come to the mainland (more precisely, two continents) in this way?!
However, recent discoveries by archaeologists and geneticists have shaken this coherent theory. It turns out that America was inhabited repeatedly, some strange peoples did this, almost related to the Australians, and besides, it is not clear on what transport the first "Indians" reached the extreme south of the New World.
The population of America. First version
Until the end of the 20th century, the “Clovis first” hypothesis dominated American anthropology, according to which it was this culture of ancient mammoth hunters that appeared 12.5-13.5 thousand years ago that was the most ancient in the New World.
According to this hypothesis, people who got to Alaska could survive on ice-free land, because there was quite a bit of snow here, but then the path to the south was blocked by glaciers until a period of 14-16 thousand years ago, due to which settlement in the Americas began only after the end of the last glaciation.
The hypothesis was coherent and logical, but in the second half of the 20th century some discoveries were made that were incompatible with it. In the 1980s, Tom Dillehay, during excavations in Monte Verde (southern Chile), found that people had been there at least 14.5 thousand years ago. This caused a strong reaction from the scientific community: it turned out that the discovered culture was 1.5 thousand years older than Clovis in North America.
In order not to rewrite students and not change their view of the characteristics of the American population, most American anthropologists simply denied the scientific reliability of the find. Already during the excavations, Delai faced a powerful attack on his professional reputation, it came to the closure of funding for excavations and attempts to declare Monte Verde a phenomenon that was not related to archeology.
Only in 1997 did he manage to confirm the dating at 14,000 years, which caused a deep crisis in understanding the ways of settling America. At that time, there were no places of such ancient settlement in North America, which raised the question of where exactly people could get to Chile.
Recently, the Chileans suggested that Delea continue excavations. Influenced by the sad experience of twenty years of excuses, he initially refused. “I was fed up,” the scientist explained his position. However, in the end he agreed and found tools at the MVI site, undoubtedly man-made, whose antiquity was 14.5-19 thousand years.
History repeated itself: archaeologist Michael Waters immediately questioned the findings. In his opinion, the finds can be simple stones, remotely similar to tools, which means that the traditional chronology of the settlement of America is still out of danger.
Delays found "guns"
Seaside nomads
To understand how justified the criticism of the new work, we turned to the anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky (Moscow State University). According to him, the tools found are indeed very primitive (processed on one side), but made from materials that are not found in Monte Verde. Quartz for a significant part of them had to be brought from afar, that is, such items cannot be of natural origin.
The scientist noted that the systematic criticism of discoveries of this kind is quite understandable: "When you teach in school and university that America was inhabited in a certain way, it is not so easy to give up this point of view."
Mammoths in Beringia
The conservatism of American researchers is also understandable: in North America, the recognized finds date back thousands of years after the period indicated by Delea. And what about the theory that before the melting of the glacier, the ancestors of the Indians blocked by it could not settle south?
However, Drobyshevsky notes, there is nothing supernatural in the more ancient dates of the Chilean sites. The islands along Canada's present-day Pacific coast were not glaciated, and bear remains from the Ice Age have been found there. This means that people could well spread along the coast, swimming across in boats and not going deep into the then inhospitable North America.
Australian footprint
However, the fact that the first reliable finds of the ancestors of the Indians were made in Chile does not end with the oddities of the settlement of America. Not so long ago, it turned out that the genes of the Aleuts and groups of Brazilian Indians have features characteristic of the genes of the Papuans and Australian Aborigines.
As the Russian anthropologist emphasizes, the data of geneticists are well combined with the results of the analysis of skulls previously found in South America and having features close to Australian ones.
In his opinion, most likely, the Australian trace in South America is associated with a common ancestral group, part of which moved to Australia tens of thousands of years ago, while the other migrated along the coast of Asia to the north, up to Beringia, and from there reached the South American continent. .
The appearance of Luzia is the name of a woman who lived 11 thousand years ago, whose remains were discovered in a Brazilian cave 
As if that weren't enough, genetic studies in 2013 showed that the Botacudo Indians of Brazil are close in mitochondrial DNA to the Polynesians and part of the inhabitants of Madagascar. Unlike the Australoids, the Polynesians could well have reached South America by sea. At the same time, traces of their genes in eastern Brazil, and not on the Pacific coast, are not so easy to explain.
It turns out that a small group of Polynesian navigators, for some reason, did not return after landing, but overcame the Andean highlands, which were unusual for them, in order to settle in Brazil. One can only guess about the motives for such a long and difficult overland journey for typical sailors.
So, a small part of the American natives have traces of genes that are very far from the genome of the rest of the Indians, which contradicts the idea of a single group of ancestors from Beringia.
30 thousand years before us
However, there are more radical deviations from the idea of settling America in one wave and only after the melting of the glacier. In the 1970s, the Brazilian archaeologist Nieda Guidon discovered the cave site of Pedra Furada (Brazil), where, in addition to primitive tools, there were many bonfires, the age of which radiocarbon analysis showed from 30 to 48 thousand years.
It is easy to understand that such figures caused great rejection by North American anthropologists. The same Deley criticized radiocarbon dating, noting that traces could remain after a fire of natural origin.
Gidon reacted sharply to such opinions of her colleagues from the United States in Latin American: “Fire of natural origin cannot arise deep in a cave. American archaeologists need to write less and dig more.”
Drobyshevsky emphasizes that although no one has yet been able to challenge the dating of the Brazilians, the doubts of the Americans are quite understandable. If people were in Brazil 40 thousand years ago, then where did they go then and where are the traces of their stay in other parts of the New World?
Toba volcano eruption
The history of mankind knows cases when the first colonizers of new lands almost completely died out, leaving no significant traces. This is what happened to Homo sapiens who settled in Asia. Their first traces there date back to the period up to 125 thousand years ago, however, genetic data say that all of humanity originated from a population that emerged from Africa, much later - only 60 thousand years ago.
There is a hypothesis that the reason for this could be the extinction of the then Asian part as a result of the eruption of the Toba volcano 70 thousand years ago. The energy of this event is considered to exceed the combined yield of all the combined nuclear weapons ever created by mankind.
However, even an event more powerful than a nuclear war is difficult to explain the disappearance of significant human populations. Some researchers note that neither Neanderthals, nor Denisovans, nor even Homo floresiensis, who lived relatively close to Toba, died out from the explosion.
And judging by individual finds in South India, local Homo sapiens did not die out at that time, traces of which are not observed in the genes of modern people for some reason. Thus, the question of where the people who settled 40 thousand years ago in South America could have gone remains open and to some extent casts doubt on the most ancient finds of the Pedra Furada type.
Genetics vs genetics
Not only archaeological data often come into conflict, but also such seemingly reliable evidence as genetic markers. This summer, Maanasa Raghavan's group at the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen announced that genetic data disproved the idea that more than one wave of ancient settlers participated in settling the Americas.
According to them, genes close to Australians and Papuans appeared in the New World later than 9,000 years ago, when America was already inhabited by immigrants from Asia.
At the same time, the work of another group of geneticists led by Pontus Skoglund came out, which, based on the same material, made the opposite statement: a certain ghost population appeared in the New World either 15 thousand years ago, or even earlier, and, perhaps, settled there before the Asian wave of migration, from which the ancestors of the vast majority of modern Indians originated.
According to them, relatives of the Australian Aborigines crossed the Bering Strait only to be forced out by the subsequent wave of "Indian" migration, whose representatives began to dominate the Americas, pushing the few descendants of the first wave into the Amazon jungle and the Aleutian Islands.
Ragnavan's reconstruction of the settlement of the Americas
Even if geneticists cannot agree among themselves on whether the “Indian” or “Australian” components became the first natives of America, it is even more difficult for everyone else to understand this issue. And yet, something can be said about this: skulls similar in shape to the Papuan ones have been found on the territory of modern Brazil for more than 10 thousand years.
The scientific picture of the settlement of the Americas is very complex, and at the present stage it is changing significantly. It is clear that groups of different origins participated in the settlement of the New World - at least two, not counting a small Polynesian component that appeared later than the others.
It is also obvious that at least part of the settlers were able to colonize the continent despite the glacier - bypassing it in boats or on ice. At the same time, the pioneers subsequently moved along the coast, quite quickly reaching the south of modern Chile. The early Americans appear to have been highly mobile, expansive, and well versed in the use of water transport.
