american-holocaust

262 APPENDIX ISkeptics remained unconvinced, however. Then Monte Verde was discovered-ahuman habitation site in a remote Chilean forest with unambiguousevidence (including a preserved human footprint) of a complexhuman community at least 13,000 years old. The excavated site revealeda dozen wooden structures made of planks and small tree trunks, the bonesof butchered mammals, day-lined hearths, mortars and grinding stones,and a variety of plant remains, some of which had been carried or tradedfrom a locale 15 miles distant, that the community's inhabitants had cultivatedand used for nutritional and medicinal purposes. 4 Clearly, since noscientists seriously doubt that the first human passage into the Americaswas by way of Berengia, this meant that humans must have entered areasto the north of Chile thousands of years earlier, a fact that was at thesame time being confirmed by reported datings of 27,000 to 37,000 B.C.from animal remains butchered by humans in Old Crow Basin and BluefishCaves in the Yukon, of 17,000 to 19,000 B.C. for human habitationin the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania, of 13,000 to 16,000B.C. for a site in Missouri, of 11,000 B.C. for human activity at WarmMineral Springs in southwestern Florida, and elsewhere. 5Then, a few years later, at Monte Verde in Chile again, archaeologistTom D. Dillehay discovered definite human artifacts that dated to at least30,000 B.C.-an age that corresponds closely to dated charcoal remainsfrom what are believed to have been human hearths at Pedra Furada innortheast Brazil. 6 Since it is a truism of archaeological research that theearliest sites discovered today are always unlikely to be anything temporallydose to the first sites that actually were inhabited-both because ofthe degradation of ancient materials and a site discovery process that makesfinding a needle in a haystack a comparatively easy task-there increasinglyis little doubt from the archaeological evidence that the northerlyparts of the Americas had to have been inhabited by humans at least 40,000years ago, and probably earlier?A welcome recent trend in this research is the attention scholars froma variety of other disciplines, including linguistics and genetics, have beenpaying to data in their fields regarding the first human occupation of NorthAmerica. As a result, the earliest dates suggested by the archaeologicalevidence are now receiving independent confirmation. At present the mostintense controversies regarding the early settlement of the Americas in thesefields surround work that is being done on DNA linkages and languageanalysis. Geneticists and biochemists who have studied mitochondrial DNAsamples from widely separated native American peoples today have cometo equally widely separated conclusions: one group of scientists finds ahigh level of shared heritage, suggesting that the great majority of AmericanIndians are descended from a single population that migrated fromAsia up to 30,000 years ago; another group, studying the same type ofdata from different sources, contends that their findings point to at least