There has been a lot of news recently about our ancestors – where they evolved and settled, and when – and these discoveries seem to imply that we are the verge of a new and exciting understanding about our origins…

 

In British Columbia, scientists have discovered a village site that is estimated to be three times as old as the Great Pyramid at Giza and among the most ancient human settlements in North America.

 

Read about it here.

 

But even more intense is the newly found evidence that Neanderthals — or another lost species — occupied what is now California some 130,000 years ago!

 

From the New York Times,

 

Humans Lived in North America 130,000 Years Ago, Study Claims

by Carl Zimmer (4/26/17)

 

 

“Prehistoric humans — perhaps Neanderthals or another lost species — occupied what is now California some 130,000 years ago, a team of scientists reported on Wednesday.

 

The bold and fiercely disputed claim, published in the journal Nature, is based on a study of mastodon bones discovered near San Diego. If the scientists are right, they would significantly alter our understanding of how humans spread around the planet.

 

The earliest widely accepted evidence of people in the Americas is less than 15,000 years old. Genetic studies strongly support the idea that those people were the ancestors of living Native Americans, arriving in North America from Asia.

 

If humans actually were in North America over 100,000 years earlier, they may not be related to any living group of people. Modern humans probably did not expand out of Africa until 50,000 to 80,000 years ago, recent genetic studies have shown…”

 

Read more here.

 

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