From Ewen Callaway at Nature:
When researchers made the astonishing suggestion last year that early humans settled the Americas 100,000 years earlier than thought, they asked doubters to keep an open mind and consider the evidence backing their claim. But their study1, which proposed that mastodon bones from California were broken by an as-yet-unidentified group of early humans 130,000 years ago, was instantly questioned by archaeologists. Most researchers agree that humans settled the Americas around 15,000 years ago.
Nearly a year later, the sceptics are still not convinced. In a rebuttal to the work, published on 7 February in Nature2, archaeologists say that modern construction equipment better explains the mastodon bone damage than does the handiwork of ancient hominins. They present an analysis of mammoth bones from Texas that, they say, have similar-looking damage, which was caused by natural wear and tear and heavy equipment. More.
Let’s hope it doesn’t all become a political correctness thugfest.
See also: Bret Weinstein, the Evergreen prof who got SJW-d? It’s partly the fault of creationists!
First North Americans might have been Neanderthals, 130 kya…
Were there humans in North America 100 thousand years ago?