ST. LOUIS — The first humans to spread across North America may
have been seal hunters from France and Spain. This runs counter
to the long-held belief that the first human entry into the
Americas was a crossing of a land-ice bridge that spanned the
Bering Strait about 13,500 years ago. The new thinking was
outlined here Sunday at the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. Recent studies have
suggested that the glaciers that helped form the bridge
connecting Siberia and Alaska began receding around 17,000 to
13,000 years ago, leaving very little chance that people walked
from one continent to the other. Also, when archaeologist Dennis
Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution places American
spearheads, called Clovis points, side-by-side with Siberian
points, he sees a divergence of many characteristics. Instead,
Stanford said Sunday, Clovis points match up much closer with
Solutrean style tools, which researchers date to about 19,000
years ago. This suggests that the America