Answer: Now our understanding of when people reached the Americas—and where they came from—is expanding dramatically. The emerging picture suggests that humans may have arrived in North America at least 20,000 years ago—some 5,000 years earlier than has been commonly believed. And new research raises the possibility of an intermediate settlement of hundreds or thousands of people who spread out over the wild lands stretching between North America and Asia. Much of this new theorizing is driven not by archaeologists wielding shovels but by evolutionary geneticists taking DNA samples from some of the oldest human remains in the Americas, and from even older ones in Asia. Those discoveries have opened a wide gap between what the genetics seem to be saying and what the archaeology actually shows. Humans may have been on both sides of the Bering Land Bridge some 20,000 years ago. But skeptical archaeologists say they will not believe in this grand idea until they hold the relevant artifacts in their hands, pointing out that no confirmed North American archaeological sites older than 15,000 to 16,000 years currently exist. But other archaeologists are confident it is only a matter of time until older sites are discovered in the sprawling, sparsely populated lands of eastern Siberia, Alaska and northwestern Canada.
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