So after that terrible post about horses in North America clearly we need to talk about Clovis First and why it's wrong and discredited.
These are some lovely Clovis stone spearpoints from the Rummels-Maske Cache site in Iowa. The Clovis Culture refers to a people who lived in North America around 13,000-10,000 years ago, and for a long time there was a near-cultish obsession amongst archaeologists with the theory that these were the first people to colonise the Americas, making American prehistory the youngest significant landmass colonisation by tens of thousands of years. This theory is called Clovis First; the suggestion being that the Clovis people crossed the Bering land bridge around 13-14,000 years ago and then spread out across the Americas.
Now as you can see here, we've got rather a lot of evidence that Clovis First is bullshit. It's particularly silly when looking at South America; the radiocarbon dates at Monte Verde might go back as far as 19,000 years ago, which considering how long it would take to get from Alaska to near the tip of South America means that an initial population crossing as early as 20,000 BP or earlier is perfectly within reason; certainly we can't imagine the first crossing being earlier than perhaps 16,000 BP in order for those dates to make sense.
The material culture here is also very much distinct from Clovis Culture, so it doesn't make sense that we've just got the date range wrong for Clovis - clearly either there are multiple crossings that populate the Americas, or Clovis Culture developed in North America from earlier material cultures.
There have been various arguments over the years about why this radiocarbon date or that DNA evidence might be controversial, but for most people the final nail in the Clovis First coffin has been the work at Paisley Caves, which has had some extremely thorough science applied to demonstrate that the methods used on other sites do in fact check out and to confirm that the site in Oregon is older than the earliest Clovis dates besides.
So why does this matter? Because the theory gets used to downplay the length of prehistory in the Americas and particularly in South America, which contributes to some of the racist treatment of mesoamerican and South American culture, theories about aliens and whatnot. White archaeologists clung to Clovis First well beyond the point at which it was clearly controversial, and it's always important to ask why that might be when dealing with a theory developed by white dudes in the 1930s.
