Professor Dave Wahl and Marie Champagne are co-authors in a new paper published by Science that re-writes the history of humans in the western hemisphere. The standard story of the peopling of the Americas has Asians migrating across a land bridge into Alaska some 14,000 years ago, after Ice Age glaciers melted back, and gradually spreading southward across a land never before occupied by humankind. But human footprints discovered in mud in what is now New Mexico were between 23,000 and 21,000 years old turned that theory on its head.
The study, led by a team of researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and co-authored by David Wahl, UC Berkeley Geography professor and USGS scientist specializing in pollen analysis, provides seemingly incontrovertible proof that humans were already living in North America during the height of the last Ice Age.
You can download and read the paper here and check out other press here: USGS National News Release, Science magazine and Berkeley News article.
Congrats, Dave!