Last week the New York Times had this article about a rock shelter in Brazil that had yielded a date of 22,000 BP for its earliest human occupation. The article goes on about its implications for dating the peopling of the New World, which if you have been reading some of our posts here, you'll know the theories regarding it are undergoing a tumultuous revolution. RTWT.
These old dates from South America have been kicking around for a while, including the almost 15,000 BP date for Monte Verde in Chile, and they expose one of the flaws with the old single Beringian migration paradigm. If the old paradigm were true, logically we should find that the earliest dated sites in Alaska should be the oldest and the earliest dated sites in Tierra del Fuego should be the youngest. Numerous studies have shown this doesn't hold true in any sense.
And I have to point out that it is sad to see good archaeologists asserting that the tools associated with the early dates must have been made by monkeys to try to deny the findings.
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