When I was in school, they taught that the first humans came to the Western Hemisphere across the Bering land bridge around the last Ice Age. What they didn't teach me was the notion these people, from Canada to Patagonia, where all part of one big culture called the "Clovis Group", based on a certain type of bifacial stone tool that had been found in different locations.
Just as well I didn't learn about that, since it's a load of crap. Steeves spends a couple of chapters in the middle of the book describing various sites across North and South America with archaeological evidence that humans reached these continents well prior to the Last Glacial Maximum. Many of these sites are in the 15-20,000 year old range, but there are still others evidently older than 40,000 years, and a few that are over 100 or even 200,000 years old.
Those oldest sites are located around what's now the Valsequillo Reservoir in Mexico, so if people were there at that time, it's certainly possible they were elsewhere prior to that, especially if they did arrive by crossing the Bering land bridge at some other point when it was above water. Or, as Steeves mentions, if people could reach Australia by boat 60,000 years ago, reaching the Western Hemisphere by island hopping across the Aleutians would seem more than manageable.
Steeves mentions a few other theories about how humans reached these continents, including by crossing the Atlantic instead. I'd have liked to read more about that, but that's not really what the book is about. Much of the focus is on the pushback by American archaeological authorities against any sites that would contradict the Clovis hypothesis. Disputing the interpretation of damage to animals bones, the aging of the stratum where the artifacts were found, denying they're artifacts at all, instead arguing it's just a bunch of rocks that broke a certain way under some natural process. Steeves agrees that there are a lot of sites that deserve further investigation and study, but she feels this immediate resistance without even examining the evidence actually shuts that down rather than encouraging it.
I'll admit I never fully grasped the point Steeves was trying to make about why these people were so hellbent on denying that humans reached the Western hemisphere further back than they first thought. There's a lot of discussion of entrenching colonialist interpretations to protect their power and status, and the need to challenge these interpretations, which often rely on little to no evidence. The book discusses how insisting on such a geologically recent arrival diminishes the claim of First Nations people that these are their ancestral lands.
12,000 years still seems like a long enough time to solidly establish that to me, but perhaps in comparison to Australia, for example, being settled 5 times longer ago, it doesn't. I just figure if the academic authorities couldn't use the argument of length of habitation, they'd find some other reason why the entire hemisphere was open territory and nothing was stolen.
But Steeves is also focused on how it impacts First Nations' communities, by disconnecting them from their heritage, traditions and culture, much of which has been passed down orally for hundreds or thousands of years. Having that be denied, being told it's incorrect, inaccurate, not the right kind of evidence, diminishes it and the people it's connected to.
Steeves gives a few examples of oral histories of different peoples that pointed to major archaeological finds. That was another thing I'd have like to read more about, because I've wondered in the past how one parses through spoken word history to separate fact from myth. Again, it's a small part of the larger point she's trying to make about how there is abundant evidence that the Clovis/Last Glacial Maximum idea that's taught in schools here in the States is bunk, and that needs to be made more widely known and get less baseless resistance from the entrenched establishment.
I expected the book to delve more into the archaeology and past lives of the earliest people to live in the Western Hemisphere. In that sense, it wasn't really what I was looking for, but what it was wound up be highly informative in its own right.
'What I am implying is for an Indigenous group to be in the Amazon or Eastern Brazil over 22,000 or 50,000 years ago, they most likely had to have walked there and in doing so left their stories on the land in many areas on their way to, say, Pedra Furada in Brazil or Monte Verde in Chile, or to Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania or the Cerutti site near San Diego, California, which is dated to minimally 130,000 years ago.'
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