Iowa (USA), June 5: A long-standing theory states that humans first entered the Americas by crossing the Bering Land Bridge 13,000 years ago.
Scientists were studying the origins of agriculture in the Coxcatlan Cave in Tehuacana Valley, southern Puebla, Mexico. They want to establish a date for the earliest human occupation. So they radiocarbon dated (a method that helps to tell the age of fossils) several rabbit and deer bones collected from the site in the 1960s. It revealed that they were 33,448 to 28,279 years old. So they were surprised to know that humans arrived in North America nearly 20,000 years earlier than the long-standing thought. So researchers are planning to take more samples and analyse for evidence of cut marks that indicate the bones were butchered by a stone tool or human to confirm their findings.
News inputs from Gurmehar.
