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There is definite evidence of hominins in North America 130,000 years ago (search "Cerutti mastodon"). Nobody knows if they were H. erectus, Neanderthal, Denisovan, modern humans, or "other", but with an interglacial at 125,000 years ago, it is not hard to see how they could have got here.



Wikipedia suggests this is not definitive, and maybe not even evidence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerutti_Mastodon_site#Criticis...

This article is much more sympathetic (and also a fun read):

https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-cerutti-masto...

I’m no expert but it seems like this is still a controversial idea.


Wikipedia over-represents the opinions of retired professors. As Max Planck wrote, "Science advances one funeral at a time".

The usual shallow, reflexive objection is that the bones must have been broken and carefully re-arranged via being run over by construction equipment. This absurd suggestion has been very thoroughly demolished without assistance from construction equipment. It is hard for dump truck tires to produce green-stick fractures in 130,000-year-old bone, or to put bone fragments into the pores of stones and then move them yards away, all while underground.




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