Indigenous archeologist Dr. Paulette Steeves (Cree-Métis) joins me to discuss The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere (University of Nebraska Press), “a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic."
There are myths we are told growing up — be it via schooling, popular media, or elsewhere — that people have lived in the Western Hemisphere for only 10-12,000 years, at most. This is the Clovis First theory. In archeology in particular, this framework, that the peopling of the North and South American continents could only have occurred that recently, is treated as dogma. In comparison to the astounding discoveries made by archeologists on other continents — pushing back human and protohominid migration, settlement, and cultural development hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years into the past — why is it that this story has persisted in this field for so long? This is especially troubling when one considers the hundreds of archaeological sites that show human settlement in the Americas extending back much further into the historical past, as documented by Dr. Paulette Steeves and numerous others.
