Why we're still arguing about the Pleistocene occupation of the Americas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Although empirical issues surround the when, how, and who questions of New World colonization, much of current debate hinges on theoretical problems because it has become clear that our understanding of New World colonization is not resolute. 1 In fact, the central issues of debate have remained essentially unchanged for the last eighty years. The now classic and probably incorrect story of New World colonization begins in Late Pleistocene Siberia, with small a population of foragers migrating across Beringia (∼13,500 calendar years before present (CYBP) (Box 1) through an ice‐free corridor and traveling through the interior of North America. High mobility and rapid population growth spurred southward expansion into increasingly distant unoccupied regions, culminating in the settlement of the Southern Cone of South America. Armed with the skills and weapons needed to maintain a megafauna‐based subsistence strategy, early colonists necessarily had the adaptive flexibility to colonize a diverse array of Pleistocene landscapes. For a time, this scenario seemed well substantiated. The earliest sites in South America were younger than their northern counterparts, fluted artifacts were found across the Americas within a brief temporal window, and projectile points capable of wounding elephant‐sized prey were commonly found in association with proboscidean remains. The Bering Land Bridge connecting Asia to Alaska and an ice‐free corridor providing passage between the Pleistocene ice masses of Canada seemed to provide a clear route of entry for Clovis colonists. However, recent archeological, paleoenvironmental, biological, and theoretical work largely questions the plausibility of these events.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".