A Paradigm Is a Career Risk
Children's footprints at White Sands, twenty-three thousand years old, in a place the ice-free corridor could not have delivered anyone to. The date is not the interesting part. The thirty years it took to accept it is.
At White Sands in New Mexico there are footprints in what used to be the soft margin of a lake. They have been dated to around twenty-three thousand years ago.
Some of them were made by children.
Hold that for a second, because it is the whole argument in one detail. Not scouts. Not a hunting party pushing into unknown country. Families, with children old enough to run about on a muddy shore while the adults did whatever they were doing. Nobody brings children to a frontier. Those footprints were not made by people arriving. They were made by people who lived there.
The problem is that according to the model taught for most of the last century, they could not have.
The standard account had the Americas populated around thirteen thousand years ago by people walking south from Alaska through an ice-free corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets. Clovis first, and nothing before Clovis.
Twenty-three thousand years ago that corridor did not exist. The two ice sheets were fused. There was no overland route.