Hueyatlaco is an archaeological site in the Valsequillo area south of Puebla in Mexico. The site was buried under the ash of the La Malinche volcano and was excavated in the 1960s by archaeologist Cynthia Irwin Williams and her team. What she found there was ground-breaking and ‘heretic’. She discovered that the site was inhabited by humans approximately 250,000 years BC. Just this on its own goes against Darwin’s theory and against mainstream archaeology which suggests that humans migrated to America from Asia at about 15,000 BC.
What archaeology suggests is that mankind started in Africa and then migrated all over the World and all of this in line with Darwin’s theory of Evolution. This means that according to archaeology there shouldn’t be any other place on Earth that mankind evolved independently and that includes America. So the hypothesis is that since primitive people didn’t have the means (e.g. boats) to travel to America they did so either by ice corridors of the North connecting Asia with America or by primitive boats for very small distances since archaeologists suggest that sea levels were much lower before the last Ice Age, and all of this took place in about 30,000 to 15,000 BC.
The received view, accepted by a majority of anthropologists and archaeologists, is that humanity did not evolve independently in the Americas, and so must have migrated there from elsewhere.
For various genetic reasons, it seems that all aboriginal Americans are more closely related to one another than they are to any other populations, and are more closely related to the peoples of Asia than those of other parts of the world. The reasonable conclusion to draw from this evidence is that the first Americans migrated from Asia, either across the Bering Strait or across a land bridge.
Large-scale migration by boat is unlikely, even across so narrow a body of water as the Bering Strait, so a hypothesized Bering Land Bridge is the best hypothesis for a migratory route.
This sequence of deductions entails a limited number of opportunities for migration. A land route was fully available only when there was sufficient glaciation for sea level to drop by about a hundred and fifty feet; such a drop in sea-level is necessary for the Bering Land Bridge (or, perhaps more properly, the land mass now called Beringia) to appear. On the other hand, if there was so much glaciation that land routes across North America were impassable, no migration could take place. These two constraints severely limit the number of opportunities for migration to special periods during ice ages.
The best candidate for a time for that migration is generally taken to be a period during the Late Pleistocene, about twelve thousand years ago. Although claims of earlier migrations are occasionally pressed on the strength of archaeological finds, the view that humans arrived relatively recently seems to be fairly well-established.
So confidently was this view held that in 1962, writing for Scientific American, William Haag could say,
“Man’s occupation of the New World may date back several tens of thousands of years, but no one rationally argues that he has been here for even 100,000 years.”
There is an impressive array of evidence for the recent-migration view, and comparatively little for any earlier human presence in the Americas. What seemed to be evidence of earlier occupation has usually turned out to be misleading.
David Meltzer (1993) describes the situation this way:
By the early 1950’s there were already indications of a much earlier human presence in America. Those hints would become broader as the years went by, until today scores of purportedly ancient sites have appeared, some with estimated ages upwards of 200,000 years. Each new candidate for great antiquity brings with it fresh claims, but the outcome remains the same. Skeptics ask hard questions. Debate ensues. The claim is accepted by some, rejected by others, while the rest wait and see. So far at least, the Clovis barrier remains intact. A pre-11,500 B.P. human presence in America does not now exist.
There are at least three impressive kinds of evidence for a Late Pleistocene migration (or set of migrations):
evidence from Native American languages
evidence from dentochronology
evidence from mitochondrial DNA 1
All three kinds of evidence point to three waves of migration, the earliest in the Late Pleistocene, as hypothesized. The earliest clearly datable sites so far are those at Clovis and Folsom, and they are no earlier than 11,500 BP.
Add to these pieces of evidence the absence of clear evidence for anything earlier, and you have a powerful argument for the recent-migration view, which gives strong reason to be skeptical of finds that purport to be older. Consider the kinds of evidence in turn.
Hueyatlaco: Defying Darwin’s Theory
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