By Megan Gannon

Humans have long made Calvert Island, located off the coast of British Columbia, their home. Over thousands of years, they've navigated its rugged terrain, roamed through its lush forests, and explored its chilly intertidal zones, gathering crabs, mussels, and various marine species.

In 2014, researchers from Canada made a significant discovery when they found human footprints embedded in an ancient layer of soil on the island. These 29 footprints represent the oldest evidence of human presence in North America. They depict a moment from 13,000 years ago when at least three individuals may have disembarked from a boat onto the wet shore, with one person seemingly losing their footing. These footprints contribute to a much broader and debated narrative about the first humans in North America.

At that time, North and South America were largely uninhabited by Homo sapiens. For thousands of years, these continents represented the final major landmasses to be settled by our species. However, the understanding of how and when this settlement occurred has undergone significant reevaluation over the past two decades.

“This field is currently in a state of upheaval,” states anthropological geneticist Jennifer Raff from the University of Kansas. “It seems there’s a noteworthy paper published every few months.” Rather than establishing a definitive new model, emerging data, particularly genetic insights, continue to complicate our understanding of how these continents became populated.

According to San Diego State University archaeologist Todd Braje, “We are less informed about the settlement of the New World now than we were two decades ago.” This sentiment reflects a growing awareness of the complexities involved, as Raff highlights, leading to a richer but less unified understanding of the data.

This lack of consensus is proving beneficial. It has prompted researchers to explore evidence from the continental shelf and other unexpected areas, crafting new narratives while also incorporating the often-overlooked perspectives of Native Americans.

Historically, many believed they had a satisfactory explanation for how the Americas were populated, with a singular theory dominating much of the 20th century's discourse.

In 1932, geologist and archaeologist Edgar B. Howard noted significant mammalian fossils at Blackwater Draw in New Mexico, where construction work had revealed numerous bison and mammoth bones. Among these remains, Howard found human artifacts, including spear points.

Howard's findings coincided with a growing realization that humans inhabited the Americas during the last ice age, which concluded approximately 10,000 years ago. Following this, archaeologists discovered distinctive fluted spear points, known as Clovis points, across North America. These artifacts became synonymous with the first settlers of the Americas, akin to the widespread appeal of Coca-Cola or baseball caps, as described by archaeologist Tom Dillehay in his book The Settlement of the Americas.

The origin of the creators of these artifacts was long believed to stem from Asia, where ancestral Native Americans supposedly crossed into the Americas via a now-submerged land bridge known as Beringia.

From there, these groups were thought to navigate a narrow passage between glaciers in Alaska and Canada that opened around 13,500 years ago. The prevalence of Clovis points, dating between 13,250 and 12,800 years ago, suggested a rapid dispersal of the first Americans after their arrival. This narrative, encompassing cultural artifacts, timelines, and the land bridge, was termed the Clovis-first model.

However, over the years, this theory faced numerous challenges, many of which were initially dismissed. “Over 500 archaeological sites across North and South America have claimed to predate Clovis, each receiving fleeting attention until flaws were identified,” notes Jim Adovasio, director of archaeology at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Genuine challenges to the Clovis-first model eventually emerged. In 1976, while teaching at the Universidad Austral de Chile, Dillehay was presented with a mastodon molar discovered by a student in a creek bed at Monte Verde in southern Chile. Initially uninterested, Dillehay's curiosity was piqued when the student returned with additional bones that exhibited cut marks and burn signs, indicating a possible archaeological site.

Years of excavation at Monte Verde confirmed the presence of humans, with the most significant cultural layer dated to approximately 14,500 years ago, predating the Clovis model by at least a millennium. Evidence shows that people lived there in a long structure made of wood and animal hides, gathering around communal hearths and consuming food sourced from coastal foraging.

Although the Clovis-first model had its critics, it wasn't until the age of Monte Verde and other pre-Clovis sites were validated that such objections gained traction. In 1997, a team of archaeologists, many of whom had previously questioned Monte Verde's age, visited the site and left convinced of its authenticity. Alex Barker, former chief curator of the Dallas Museum of Natural History, noted, “Monte Verde is real, it's ancient, and it changes everything.”

In the past two decades, several other North American sites have gained acceptance as pre-Clovis. Unlike Clovis sites, these earlier locations typically lack distinctive artifacts. At Oregon’s Paisley Caves, fossilized human feces have been dated to around 14,300 years ago. The Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, excavated by Adovasio in the 1970s, may have human artifacts dating back at least 16,000 years. Beneath the Clovis layers at Buttermilk Creek in Texas, researchers have discovered thousands of stone tool fragments dating to approximately 15,500 years ago. In Argentina's Pampas grasslands, butchered animal bones have been found dating back 14,000 years.

As researchers validate these discoveries, they are reconstructing the narrative that many of us have learned in textbooks. The notion of a singular founding population may have been oversimplified. “It appears to be more akin to a steady trickle, with people arriving at different times and from various directions,” Dillehay explains.

Most archaeologists now concur that a diverse array of culturally rich groups inhabited the Americas at least one or two millennia before the emergence of Clovis points, placing human presence in the Americas roughly 15,000 years ago—a conservative estimate.

As the Clovis-first model wanes, even more ambitious timelines are surfacing. Some researchers argue they have found evidence of humans butchering megafauna as far back as 130,000 years ago at the Cerutti mastodon site in Southern California, although this claim has sparked considerable debate among archaeologists. In a Science article, Braje, Dillehay, and colleagues noted that the decline of the Clovis-first paradigm “has opened a Pandora’s box of alternative theories for the peopling of the Americas,” with some quickly accepting implausible claims based on limited evidence, citing the Cerutti site as an example.

Genetic research has also yielded an overwhelming influx of data that clarifies how entire lineages migrated across continents. For instance, genetic markers from a child buried in Alaska roughly 11,500 years ago indicate she shared DNA with all Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The researchers concluded she likely descended from a population that remained in Beringia rather than spreading into the lower continents.

Geneticists have uncovered that a population known as Beringians diverged from Siberian groups approximately 36,000 years ago. Around 25,000 years ago, this group became isolated, leading to the emergence of a new genetic lineage linked to present-day Native Americans, which split into two primary lineages around 17,000 years ago.

However, the genetic record is sparse, with only a few ice age human remains analyzed, necessitating archaeological data to corroborate and illuminate the ancient pathways taken by early humans across these continents.

For instance, an intriguing inconsistency arises: genetic evidence implies one population may have spent thousands of years in Beringia during a period called the Beringian standstill before migrating into the Americas during the Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 27,000 to 19,000 years ago.

“Yet archaeological evidence for this standstill is lacking,” states Ripan Malhi, a genetic anthropologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Without supporting archaeological findings, skepticism remains regarding the genetic data.

The pathways of migration are also debated. Some archaeologists maintain that humans could have traversed land into North America, while others argue that this route was likely impassable due to ice coverage over 13,500 years ago.

An alternative hypothesis gaining traction suggests that early arrivals came by boat. According to this coastal migration theory, roughly 16,000 years ago, the ice had retreated from the Pacific Northwest coast, allowing seafaring people to exploit coastal resources like kelp forests and navigate down the California coastline, eventually reaching sites like Monte Verde in Chile.

Validating the coastal theory presents challenges. No wooden boats from that period have been recovered along the shore, and many of the earliest coastal campsites may have been lost to erosion and rising sea levels. Nonetheless, there are indicators of human habitation along the Pacific coast, such as the footprints on Calvert Island.

Evidence of human presence dating back at least 13,000 years on the Channel Islands in California suggests that these early inhabitants possessed the skills to construct boats and reach these islands. In the past 15 years, archaeologists have discovered remnants of a settlement nearly 13,000 years old on Cedros Island off Baja California. Some researchers, like Loren Davis from Oregon State University, are employing coring techniques to search for submerged prehistoric sites along the Pacific continental shelf.

Moreover, many non-Native scientists are beginning to recognize the implications of their findings for Native American communities, who have had to reconcile their cultural narratives with scientific accounts of how their ancestors arrived on these continents.

Native American scholars and advocates have long critiqued the Clovis-first model, particularly its implication that Native Americans originated from the Bering Land Bridge. Vine Deloria Jr., a prominent Standing Rock Sioux lawyer and scholar, referred to this migration narrative as “scientific folklore” in his 1995 book Red Earth, White Lies.

“Language shapes our understanding of the world,” asserts Kim TallBear.

For many, the scientific account of origin was viewed as undermining the historical presence of Indigenous peoples in their ancestral lands. The narrative that emphasizes migration from elsewhere subtly suggests a parallel between Native Americans' ancestors and European explorers who arrived centuries later, obscuring the trauma and dispossession inflicted upon Indigenous peoples by European colonists.

“There’s an immigrant narrative, either conscious or subconscious, that ‘we are all immigrants,’ which influences how scientists and many non-Indigenous people perceive human history on this continent,” says TallBear, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate.

TallBear urges non-Native scientists and writers to reflect on their terminology. “Language creates reality for the world,” she emphasizes. Referring to certain ancestral groups as “first Americans” or labeling the land as the “New World” can reinforce the notion that Indigenous peoples of the Americas are newcomers in a recent context.

Additionally, narratives surrounding the first inhabitants of the Americas often focus on simplistic and mechanistic motivations for migration, such as the search for food. TallBear critiques representations in media that depict the earliest North American arrivals as a “disheveled group trudging across a submerged Bering ‘land bridge.’”

“Intellectual motivations or curiosity are often overlooked,” she observes, as if these individuals lacked depth. “The language tends to portray migrants as devoid of the full human experience, without laughter, kinship dynamics, or joy.”

Fortunately, some non-Native archaeologists and geneticists are becoming increasingly aware of Indigenous concerns. “My role is not to dictate identity to Native groups,” Davis explains. “They have their own narratives about being rooted in this place since time immemorial.”

Scientists often seek to quantify the timeline of human presence in the Americas. “Fifteen thousand years? It’s challenging to comprehend what it means to have existed in a location for so long—it feels like an eternity,” Davis reflects.

By collaborating with Indigenous communities and increasing the representation of Indigenous individuals in archaeology, scientists can sidestep the pitfalls and oversights of previous narratives. The findings from Calvert Island exemplify how these changes can advance scientific knowledge.

When researchers from the Hakai Institute and the University of Victoria began excavating on the island, they did so in partnership with representatives from the Heiltsuk and Wuikinuxv peoples. These Indigenous groups possess oral histories about a strip of coastline that remained ice-free, aiding their ancestors' survival during periods when much of the land was glaciated. The discovery of the footprints validated these traditions, with one Heiltsuk member envisioning the beachgoers as a family—a father, mother, and child.

While we cannot determine the thoughts or actions of those individuals 13,000 years ago, we can imagine scenarios: perhaps the mother helped her child from the boat, laughed at her partner's stumble, or inhaled the briny scent of low tide while gazing at the distant icy landscape. She might have visited that beach before or heard stories about it from her tribe. Or perhaps, as she looked inland, she pondered if she was the first to step upon that shore.

Megan Gannon is a journalist based in Berlin, Germany.