The First Americans: The Current Debate

Scholars from multiple disciplines generally agree about new models for the origin and dating of migration to the Western Hemisphere, replacing the rigid Clovis-first model that had dominated texts for the past fifty years. This new research has not resolved all of the questions relating to this migration; serious controversies still exist. But the development of the new field of genetic studies and the recent opening of major South American archaeological sites has resolved many older debates and has provided a far more nuanced and complex early history of mankind in the Western Hemisphere than existed before.