From the evidence of words they spoke, the trash they scattered and the genes they left their descendants, the mysterious first settlers of the Americas landed in the New World as long as 40,000 years ago, well before the last ice age swept across the continent, new research suggests.
Based on new findings in linguistics, molecular anthropology and archeology, at least four leading scholars have concluded that these ancient pioneers spread across the Americas eons before the Clovis people, who until recently were believed to have settled the continent about 11,500 years ago.
Moreover, once they made their way to the New World, the earliest American immigrants may have then been isolated from their original Siberian homeland by glacial ice for thousands of years, according to the new research. The spreading glaciers may have forced them to flee far to the south and, as the climate warmed again, they resettled North America.
Until recently, there were no identifiable remains of these enigmatic first-comers to hint at their existence. Indeed, there are only seven known complete skeletons of any ancient North Americans and fragments of about 20 more.
But it appears from human bones recently discovered in Washington state and Nevada that these earliest settlers may not have resembled any contemporary Native Americans or any other living branch of the family of man.
"Preliminary observations of these skeletons suggest that these folks are probably from a population that predated modern North American Indians physically," said Dennis Stanford, chairman of the anthropology department at the Smithsonian Institution. "They appear to be racially different.
"The peopling of the New World," he said, "is a much more complex issue than we had thought heretofore."
While no one is certain yet about the identity of those who first settled the New World, there is a growing scholarly consensus about when they arrived:
* New analysis of Native American languages suggests that people arrived in the New World 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, said Johanna Nichols, a linguistics expert at UC Berkeley. Her research indicates that indigenous languages in the Americas are so diverse--with about 150 distinct language families identified so far--that they must have taken at least that many millenniums to evolve.
