A new study finds: First America settlers arrived in America much sooner than previously thought.

A new recently released scientific study claims that the first American settlers may have come through a coastal ” kelp highway ” from northeastern Asia, long before any other another culture set foot in America, most likely around 15,000 years ago.

The Clovis culture that appeared in the Americas about 13,500 years ago is widely accepted as the ancestor of most of the indigenous cultures of the continent.

However, with a growing body of evidence supporting them, anthropologists have declared that the idea that the people of Clovis were here first is now ruled out.

This naturally means that the first settlers came much sooner than 13,500 years ago to America.

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The people of Clovis are so called because the artifacts of their culture were first found in Clovis, New Mexico in 1932. There are very few skeletal remains, but those of a boy named Anzick-1 from a Clovis cemetery in Montana showed a genetic connection with modern populations of Native Americans and Siberia.

It is believed that the Clovis went to the Americas by land using the Bering Land Bridge in the Bering Sea during the last Ice Age, and came from the cold wilderness of Siberia.

However, not everyone agrees with the Siberian origin, since the genome of Anzick-1 showed a genetic divergence of the populations of Siberia, but that the people of Clovis are not in dispute.

Now, according to a team of US anthropologists, there is increasing evidence pointing to the existence of a previous settlement, at a time when glaciers would have blocked the bridge over the Bering land.

This means that the first American settlers had to travel to the new continents using an entirely different route.

” In a dramatic intellectual turnabout, most archaeologists and other scholars now believe that the earliest American settlers followed Pacific Rim shorelines from northeast Asia to Beringia and the Americas,” the team writes in the latest study.

“As explained by the kelp highway hypothesis, deglaciation of the outer coast of North America’s Pacific Northwest ∼17,000 years ago formed a possible dispersal corridor rich in aquatic and terrestrial resources along the Pacific Coast, including productive kelp forest and estuarine ecosystems at sea level and no major geographic barriers,” explained researchers.

In recent years, more and more evidence implies the existence of previous settlements.

A 2011 document found stone tools in Texas that could be traced back to 15,500 years, and petrified stools found in Oregon dating back 14,000 years.

This means that people existed much sooner than experts thought.

Experts also found a skeleton of a mastodon with a piece of bone from another mastodon embedded in its rib, indicating that humans had hunted it with bone spear points.

This event goes back 13,800 years.

And just last year, a document was published describing a mastodon hunted in Florida, dating back 14,550 years ago.

“There is ample data – genetic, archaeological, and geologic – that sustain a colonization that occurred around 20,000–15,000 years ago,” senior researcher Torben Rick from the US National Museum of Natural History told Seeker, in an interview.

“This does not exclude previous migrations, or suggests that we should not investigate previous migrations, but a growing body of evidence is based on intensive research that supports the time frame of 20,000 to 15,000 years ago, and the evidence of previous migrations is problematic and speculative.”

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Featured image: Shutterstock.

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