Archaeological Roots of Human Diversity in the New World: A Compilation of Accurate and Precise Radiocarbon Ages from Earliest Sites

• Published in: American Antiquity
• Main Author: Faught, Michael K.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 2008
• Subjects: Fishtail Point; Alaska; Beringia
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0002731600047351; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0002731600047351

A compilation of 63 stratigraphic situations with evidence for human presence and two or more radiocarbon ages older than 10,500 B.P. has been processed to increase the accuracy and precision of the estimated ages and to compare their distributions at hemispheric scale. The compilation was developed to perceive patterns of population expansion and to plot early sites in their temporal and geographic order. The use of radiocarbon dates as data, criteria for inclusion in the compilation, the statistical processing methods used, and effects of controlling for precision and accuracy are described. The results indicate three earliest mean ages with great distance from each other in North and South America by 12,000 B.P., slightly later mean ages in Alaska, and the abrupt occurrence of Fluted and Fishtail Point sites at the beginning of the Younger Dryas climatic reversal (YD). One interpretation of these data is that there were different colonizing groups settling into different parts of the hemisphere in near-contemporaneity. Another is that Fluted and Fishtail Point sites may represent population relocations due to YD related ecological disturbances at the shorelines of those times. Corollary to the conclusions of early population diversity is the possibility of landfalls of people from areas other than Beringia in the late Pleistocene.