The history of settlement of the Americas is being rewritten. Sensational finds in Brazil show the first Americans arrived much earlier than assumed. Scholars have long agreed that ice age hunters migrated on foot from Asia to America via a land bridge 12,000 years ago. However, these new findings show that, at that time, the Brazilian Sierra Capybara was already inhabited. After the concentration of sites including 50,000 rock paintings was found, archaeologists were able to prove samples dated back at least 30,000 years. This makes them 18,000 years older than the finds in Clovis, New Mexico, on which the current theory is based.
Thus, South America was not colonised from North America. But questions remain: Where did these first Americans come from? How and why did they migrate? And why did they vanish almost without a trace?
