Got a theory that breaks a consensus? Expect aggressive silence. Snickering. Wait decades

For a long time it was thought the first people arrived in the Americas around 13,000 years ago.Jacques Cinq-Marc found a set of caves in the Yukon called the Bluefish Caves laden with bones marked with cuts from human butchering. They were radiocarbon dated as 24,000 years old. Cinq-Marcs published a series of papers between 1979-2001.

This is a topic that doesn’t have a $1.5 Trillion dollar industry riding on it. No political careers are made or broken if humans arrived in the Americas millenia earlier. Yet still, the smug scoffing of the consensus slowed progress in science for decades.

What Happens When an Archaeologist Challenges Mainstream Scientific Thinking?

Heather Pringer, Smithsonian.com

Cinq-Mars… work at Bluefish Caves suggested that Asian hunters roamed northern Yukon at least 11,000 years before the arrival of the Clovis people. And other research projects lent some support to the idea. At a small scattering of sites, from Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania to Monte Verde in Chile, archaeologists had unearthed hearths, stone tools and butchered animal remains that pointed to an earlier migration to the Americas. But rather than launching a major new search for more early evidence, the finds stirred fierce […]