The first humans in America may not have been Homo sapiens

WHEN did the first human beings arrive in the Americas? Though there are arguments about the details, the consensus is that it was around 15,000 years ago, when retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age permitted travellers from Asia to cross what is now the Bering strait but was then dry land.

This makes sense. The evidence suggests that, recent migrants from Africa and their progeny aside, people now alive in Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas are descended from a handful of Africans who left the continent of their birth about 70,000 years ago. This fits nicely with the conventional date for America’s colonisation, by giving time for the heirs of these African émigrés to make it to eastern Asia, ready for the hop to the New World when conditions permitted.