By now you have read that the Clovis people may have had contemporaries. In case you didn’t know, until about ~10 years the “standard model” of the peopling of the Americas was that around ~13,000 years ago one single population crossed into the New World via Beringia, and rapidly swept north to south in ~1,000 years. These were the Clovis people, associated with a particular toolkit, and perhaps implicated in megafaunal extinctions. Today this model is no longer held to be sacrosanct, though no clear successor has emerged. It does seem likely that some sort of pre-Clovis population is presumed to exist. These data are interesting because they indicate that there may have been geographical structure in cultural forms even at this early stage in North America, implying that the original peopling of America was not homogeneous. That is, there may have been several founding groups.
I find this entirely plausible. It strikes me that a fear years ago a tendency toward rhetorical extremism occasionally found purchase when it came to the settlement of the peripheries of the human range, Oceania and the New World. Jared Diamond famously proposed that …