A paper published in biorxiv proposes that the first Americans arrived 30,000 years ago. It is worth reading. It has an interesting analysis of mtDNA and Y-chromosome haplogroups.
This is the citation: What uniparental genetic markers tell us about the prehistoric human colonization of the Americas, Vicente M Cabrera. bioRxiv 2025.08.04.668419; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.04.668419
Not peer reviewed
Two brief exerpts from this paper:
Early Entry and New Dispersal Routes within the continent
The paper suggests that:
"If we accept that Asian populations gave rise to Native Americans before 30 kya, then the story of human settlement in America can be viewed differently. It is known that since their arrival, the climate gradually worsened, covering Arctic and Antarctic regions with ice (Clark et al. 2009), clearing the Amazon and Central American rainforests (Häggi et al. 2017), and transforming most of the land into forests and dry steppes (University of Geneva, Switzerland et al. 2001). During this tough period, humans had to survive in small, isolated groups and adapt to different glacial refugia, leaving few archaeological traces. When the climate improved, these groups grew in number and expanded into new, now habitable areas. Unlike the rapid southern wave of colonization, the American continent was not empty of humans. The post-LGM colonization was not a single or multiple waves spreading from northern North America to settle Mesoamerica and then South America. Instead, it involved more or less simultaneous radiations from various regions, most of which, based on uniparental markers, are centered in South America."
Forget all the quick or slow or standstill theories
"The early arrival of Native uniparental lineages in the Americas, over 30 kya, as proposed here, renders the hypotheses of a prolonged (Hoffecker et al. 1993; Tamm et al. 2007) or brief (Pinotti et al. 2019) standstill in Beringia, a previous expansion of their ancestors into Asia (Wei et al. 2018; Sun et al. 2021; Ning et al. 2020), or the existence of a Pacific Coastal Route around 20 kya (Scheib et al. 2018; Davis and Madsen 2020; Li et al. 2023), unnecessary.
The archaeological evidence for humans in the Siberian Arctic around 30 kya (Pitulko et al. 2004) and possibly since 45 kya (Pitulko et al. 2017) supports the idea of an early entrance into America by its native ancestors. More challenging is gaining acceptance from archaeologists for human occupation in the American continent before and around the LGM, but it looks pretty likely that this occurred around 16-18 kya at Monte Verde, Chile (Dillehay et al. 2015), at the Santa Elina site in Central Brazil during the LGM, at Chiquihuite Cave in Central Mexico about 30 kya (Ardelean et al. 2020), in the Colorado Plateau more than 36 kya (Rowe et al. 2022), at White Sands, New Mexico, during a stratigraphic record spanning from 24 kya to 17 kya (Holliday et al. 2025), and at Bluefish Caves, Canada, approximately 24 kya (Bourgeon et al. 2017)."
I also like the fact that the paper points out that the Amazon basin has ancient, deep rooted mtDNA and Y-chromosome halpogroups, and its antiquity and diversity is also reflected in the large amount of languages spoken by the locals. It is, according to this paper, a "radiation center" in the peopling of America.
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