Mexican Cave Contains Signs of Human Visitors From 30,000 Years Ago
3rd December 2020
The stunning discoveries recently made in northern Mexico’s Chiquihuite Cave raise more questions than they answer. Even so, they change the conversation: The who arrived 15,000 years ago in the Western Hemisphere were not the first people here as previously believed. The 30,000-year-old tools and animal remains of Chiquihuite Cave belonged to someone else. We have no idea who, but they were gone for thousands of years by the time the Clovis culture began.
“For decades people have passionately debated when the first humans entered the Americas,” says co-study lead DNA scientist Eske Willerslev of St. John’s College, University of Cambridge. “Chiquihuite Cave will create a lot more debate as it is the first site that dates the arrival of people to the continent to around 30,000 years ago — 15,000 years earlier than previously thought.”