when did humans travel

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World history

Course: world history   >   unit 1.

• History and prehistory
• Prehistory before written records
• Knowing prehistory

Homo sapiens and early human migration

• Peopling the earth
• Where did humans come from?
• Paleolithic societies
• Paleolithic technology, culture, and art
• Organizing paleolithic societies
• Paleolithic life
• The origin of humans and early human societies
• Homo sapiens , the first modern humans, evolved from their early hominid predecessors between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. They developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago.
• The first modern humans began moving outside of Africa starting about 70,000-100,000 years ago.
• Humans are the only known species to have successfully populated, adapted to, and significantly altered a wide variety of land regions across the world, resulting in profound historical and environmental impacts.

Where do we begin?

Migration and the peopling of the earth, how and why, adaptation and effects on nature, what do you think.

• Strayer, Robert W. and Eric W. Nelson, Ways of the World: a Global History (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016), 3-4.
• See "The Evolution of Humans" , Boundless.
• See Bulliet, Richard W. et. al.: _The Earth and its Peoples: A Global History (Boston, Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2011), 4-6.
• See Spodek, Howard: The World's History (New Jersey: Pearson, 2006), 5-9.
• See Bentley, Jerry H. et. al., Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2015), 8-10.
• See Melissa Hogenboom, "The first people who populated the Americas" , BBC Earth, 2017.
• See Bentley, Traditions and Encounters , 8-10.

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2.1 Early Human Evolution and Migration

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Discuss the process of human evolution in a biological and anthropological context
• Explain how and why Paleolithic humans migrated
• Describe the tools and technologies used in the Paleolithic Age

Millions of years ago, our distant ancestors descended from the trees, took to walking upright on the land, and gradually evolved into the species we are today. Their evolution was influenced by many variables, including changes in climate, diet, and survival strategies. Over time, humans developed new skills and tools to meet the challenges of endurance and sought better prospects for themselves through cooperation and migration.

Understanding these changes and the long-ago origins of our species has required careful research by archaeologists, anthropologists, genetic scientists, historians, sociologists, and many others. Through painstaking reconstructions and study, these specialists have used a relatively small number of archaeological finds and material remnants of our distant ancestors to paint a striking picture of our prehistoric past, going back millions of years. The nature of this work, however, requires using some extrapolation, educated speculation, and outright guesswork to piece together the bits of unearthed evidence into an intelligible story. This means that even as we have had to discard old theories when new information has emerged, there remain plenty of things we’ll simply never know for sure.

Human Evolution

The concept of evolution over time is one we are all likely familiar with. Consider, for example, how technology has evolved. The first true smartphones appeared on the market at the beginning of this century, but these complicated devices didn’t spring all at once from the minds of ambitious engineers. Rather, these engineers built on technology that had evolved and improved over many decades. In the mid-1800s, telegraph technology first demonstrated that electricity could be used for long-distance communication. That technology paved the way for the first telephones, which were basic and expensive but over many decades became more sophisticated, more common, and cheaper. By the early 1980s, electronics companies had begun selling telephones that used radio technology to communicate wirelessly. Over time these devices were made faster and smaller, and companies added features like cameras, microprocessors, and eventually internet access. With these evolutionary transformations, the smartphone was born.

Link to Learning

Use this guided activity from the Evolution Lab to explore how we study biological relationships between species using phylogenetics to learn more. Try to create your own “Tree of Life.”

Modern humans are not smartphones, and in human history, chance biological adaptations to a changing environment drove the evolutionary process rather than the minds of inventors conceiving of technical innovations. But the evolutionary process that eventually gave birth to our species resembles the technological evolution of smartphones and other devices in some important ways. Just like we can trace the evolution of the smartphone back to the telegraph, so can we trace our own evolution back to a very distant ancestor called Australopithecus , who lived in eastern and southern Africa between 2.5 and 4 million years ago. Lucy, previously mentioned, was of the genus Australopithecus ( Figure 2.3 ). A genus is a taxonomic rank that includes several similar and related species within it. Like us, members of Lucy’s species afarensis (named for the Afar region of East Africa where she was found) were capable of walking upright and likely used tools. Beyond that, however, they were very different from us. They had plenty of hair like chimpanzees, fingers and arms well suited for climbing trees, and brains about one-third the size of ours. Despite these differences, scholars have concluded that the genus Homo (“human”) evolved from Australopithecus somewhere around two to three million years ago.

Possibly the earliest member of the genus Homo was Homo habilis ( Figure 2.4 ). This species appears in the archaeological record about two to three million years ago. Habilis means “handy”; it was thought at one time that this was the first species to have created stone tools. We now know that stone tools predate Homo habilis , but the name has stuck. Homo habilis resembles us in many ways, with a large brain similar to ours as well as small teeth and a face we might recognize as human. But members of the species also had many ape-like characteristics, such as long arms, hairy bodies, and adult heights of only three or four feet.

Around two million years ago, a species even more similar to us, Homo erectus , emerged in East Africa. It likely evolved from Homo habilis . As the name erectus for “upright” suggests, this species lived entirely on the ground and walked—even ran—exclusively in an upright position. The consequences of this evolutionary shift were huge. Being upright meant that the body’s digestive organs were pulled down lower and into a smaller space. That in turn necessitated a change in diet, away from tough plants and toward easier-to-digest items like nuts, fruits, tubers, honey, and even meat. Living on the ground was also more dangerous because it made eluding predators more difficult. However, the upright position left Homo erectus ’s hands free to use tools. This advantage likely led to further evolutions that made human hands more dexterous over time, prompting the wider adoption of ever more sophisticated tools.

Members of Homo erectus shared other close similarities with modern humans. They were about the same height as we are, sometimes reaching just over six feet. They made and used relatively sophisticated stone tools and relied on fire for both warmth and cooking food. They likely constructed huts of wood and fur in which to live and worked cooperatively with each other to hunt and forage. The position of the larynx in the throat also suggests that Homo erectus may have had some capacity to communicate vocally, which would have aided in cooperative endeavors. Finally, archaeologists have uncovered strong evidence that Homo erectus cared for the sick and elderly. This evidence includes the discovery of the remains of individuals who suffered from debilitating diseases yet lived a long time, indicating that assistance was both necessary and provided by others. Together these characteristics made the species highly adaptable to changing climates and environments, helping explain why its members survived for so long. Homo erectus populations lived until as recently as about 100,000 years ago.

Sometime between 1.8 and 1.5 million years ago, Homo erectus started migrating into other parts of Africa and beyond, reaching North Africa, the Near East, Europe, and East and South Asia over hundreds of thousands of years. The reasons for this extensive migration are still debated, but they likely included climate change and the desire to follow certain types of prey. Homo erectus appears to have stayed close to rivers and lakes during migration, hunting and eating animals like rhinoceroses, bears, pigs, and crocodiles, as discoveries in the Near East have confirmed. Populations evolved to adapt to the different environmental conditions into which they moved. Over time this led to a diversity of human species, including Homo heidelbergensis ; Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals ; Denisovans; and modern humans, or Homo sapiens ( sapiens means “wise”). Some of these species, like Denisovans and Neanderthals, emerged outside Africa. Others , like Homo heidelbergensis and Homo sapiens , emerged in Africa first and later migrated to other areas.

The extent to which these different human species interacted with each other remains unclear. DNA evidence from a bone found in Siberia has shown that a girl (who died at age thirteen) was born there of a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother. Another recent study demonstrated that modern European and Middle Eastern populations have between 1 and 4 percent Neanderthal DNA. This appears to suggest that mating between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals was quite common. The careful work of archaeologists and other scholars has also made clear that some species evolved from others. For example, both Neanderthals and Denisovans appear to have evolved from populations of Homo heidelbergensis .

At some point between forty thousand and fifteen thousand years ago, the diversity of human species declined and only Homo sapiens remained. Two models attempt to explain why. The first and most commonly accepted is the “ out of Africa ” model. This theory suggests that modern humans emerged first in Africa approximately 200,000 years ago and then, approximately 100,000 years ago, expanded out of Africa and replaced all other human species. The second model is often called the “ multiregional evolution model ” and proposes that Homo sapiens evolved from Homo erectus in several places around the same time. This model emerged as an explanation for the great diversity of modern human traits in different populations around the world. But it relies primarily on the study of fossils and archaeological records rather than on genetic data.

These theories about human evolution are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and the real answer to the puzzle may be a combination of the two. For example, it’s entirely possible that modern humans or a common ancestor did emerge first in Africa. Then, as this species expanded around the world, it mixed its genetic information with that of other human species. The DNA evidence collected in recent years certainly suggests a more complicated picture, and the debate has not yet been settled. The tools of both archaeology and molecular genetics continue to reveal new insights into the puzzle of human evolution and the rise of Homo sapiens . And the conclusions we can draw about our distant past will continue to change as we learn more.

Dueling Voices

What happened to neanderthals in europe.

For tens of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe, the continent was home to Neanderthals ( Figure 2.5 ). Then, about forty thousand years ago, right around the time modern humans entered Europe, the species neanderthalensis began to rapidly die out. For more than a century and a half, scholars have been trying to understand why.

One theory is that modern humans replaced the Neanderthals in Europe through violent competition, including a type of warfare between the two groups. Another model argues that the competition was less about violence and more about resources. This theory posits that modern humans were simply better tool makers, had better survival strategies, and possibly experienced lower mortality rates and higher birth rates. Neanderthals simply couldn’t keep up, and their small population dwindled and then disappeared entirely.

Modern DNA analysis has opened the door for a new theory, that mating occurred between the two species and that the population of Neanderthals was simply absorbed by modern humans. The presence of small amounts of Neanderthal DNA in modern human populations lends some credibility to this idea, but it seems unlikely to explain the total disappearance of Neanderthals.

Finally, analysis of climate change in Europe has revealed some variations that could have weakened Neanderthal populations and led to their disappearance in some areas. As of now, no one theory can account for everything. It seems possible that several factors were at play rather than a single primary cause, so the debate goes on.

• How might more than one of these reasons, or all of them, have contributed to the decline of Neanderthals in Europe?
• Can you think of any other explanations for the extinction of Neanderthals?

Why Did Humans Move and Where Did They Go?

Archeological evidence indicates that Homo sapiens began migrating out of eastern and southern Africa as early as 200,000 years ago. This expansion took early humans deeper south, west, and north as far as the Mediterranean Sea. Approximately 100,000 years ago, groups of Homo sapiens left the African continent and began a global migration that lasted for tens of thousands of years ( Figure 2.6 ). After crossing the Sinai into southwest Asia, early migrants out of Africa likely followed the coasts of Asia, and by about seventy thousand years ago, they had made their way into India and China.

Some groups continued moving south through Malaysia, into Indonesia and beyond. In places like Papua New Guinea and Australia, there is evidence of settlements at least forty-five thousand years old. Others groups making their way into southwest Asia from northern Africa entered Europe around forty thousand years ago, moving either along the Mediterranean coast or by way of Turkey into the Danube valley. By twenty-five thousand years ago, Homo sapiens had reached Siberia and other parts of northern Asia. And approximately fifteen thousand years ago, some groups in Asia crossed into North America, eventually reaching the tip of South America and settling at various locations in between.

This timeline has been pieced together based on the analysis of several archaeological finds. But our knowledge is still limited, and new discoveries frequently require adjustments to the proposed dates and patterns of global human migration. For example, we now know that because the Earth was in its most recent ice age during this period, areas currently covered by water were then dry land. This is true for large portions of maritime Southeast Asia as well as the Bering Strait between Asia and North America. Humans were able to walk as far south as Java and from Asia into Alaska.

Yet they also roamed as far as Australia, which was not connected by land to Asia in this period. This means they must have used rafts of some type, probably by crossing short distances between islands. Likewise, discoveries of human habitation dating from fourteen thousand years ago in South America suggest that rafts or boats of some kind may also have been used to skirt the North and South American coasts. No crafts have been or may ever be found, but we must assume they existed.

More interesting still, analysis of the remains of the eight-thousand-year-old Kennewick Man discovered in 1996 in Washington State reveals anatomical features more consistent with Southeast Asian populations than with those traditionally assumed to have populated the Americas. This discovery complicates the version of human migration we think we know, and if anything, it suggests there is much about the process that we may never fully understand.

But what triggered this migration in the first place? Despite the uncertainties, we can draw some speculative conclusions. We know that around the same time Homo sapiens began leaving Africa, the climate there was becoming increasingly dry. Drier conditions meant fewer of the plants and animals humans needed to survive were available. Modern humans were hunter-gatherers like their evolutionary ancestors, meaning they survived by employing the strategies of hunting animals and gathering wild plants rather than by planting crops and raising livestock. As hunter-gathering societies regularly forage over a large area, any scarcity of resources in some places or abundance in others encourages movement. In the lifetime of a single individual, a large-scale migration would have been barely perceptible, if at all. But over tens of thousands of years, human populations traversed an enormous portion of the globe. Nor did they go in a single direction or all at once. Groups likely moved back and forth over areas, responding to the climatic conditions and availability of resources. There were long periods of relative stasis punctuated by movement, creating waves of migration in various directions.

As humans moved into new environments, they adjusted their strategies to be successful under new conditions. This meant learning to gather different types of plants and hunt different types of animals they came into contact with, including mastodons, woolly mammoths and rhinos, various types of grazing animals, and giant sloths and beavers. The arrival of humans who were highly effective at survival occasionally accompanied major transformations in their new environments. Scientists who study now-extinct animals have recognized for some time that human hunting likely contributed to the decline of a number of these species. Before humans arrived approximately forty-five thousand years ago, for example, Australia was home to a number of large reptiles, a marsupial lion (which carried its young in a pouch), and huge wombats and kangaroos ( Figure 2.7 ). These species began to vanish around the same time humans reached Australia and well before the climatic warming that led to the extinction of large animals in other places.

Early Human Technologies

To understand how early humans lived hundreds of thousands and even millions of years ago, scholars use the tools of archaeology to analyze the objects left behind. Many were made of materials like wood, animal skin, and earth, which rarely endure in the archaeological record. Bone items are somewhat more durable and have occasionally survived. But our window into the distant past is quite small. Stone items are the most likely to have lasted long enough for us to study them today. Beginning possibly as early as 3.3 million years ago, our distant pre-human ancestors began using stone tools for a variety of purposes. This event marks the start of the Paleolithic Age ( lithos means “stone”), which lasted until nearly twelve thousand years ago.

The earliest known human-made stone tools date from about 2.6 million years ago. They were likely first created by Homo habilis , by smashing smooth rocks together to create crudely sharpened edges. The resulting implements are often described as Oldowan tools , and their use continued until about 1.7 million years ago. While a seemingly simple adaptation from our perspective, the development of Oldowan tools in fact represents a huge leap in human engineering ability. These sharpened stones served a variety of cutting, scraping, and chopping purposes. They were highly efficient tools for killing animals, butchering meat, smashing bones to access marrow, and a host of similar tasks.

Beginning around 1.7 million years ago, some ancient humans began to develop a new and more sophisticated style of stone tool by carefully chipping away smaller flakes of the stone core to create a teardrop-shaped implement often described as a hand-axe. Far thinner and sharper than the Oldowan tools, hand-axes were even better at the cutting, scraping, and chopping tasks for which they were designed. They were such an improvement over earlier tools that archaeologists have given them their own name. They are called Acheulean tools (pronounced ah-SHOOL-ee-an ), after Saint-Acheul, the site in France where they were first found in the nineteenth century CE. Since then, more Acheulean tools have been uncovered in Africa, the Middle East, and India and scattered in parts of East Asia ( Figure 2.8 ).

Far superior to the Oldowan variety, Acheulean tools remained the dominant style of stone tool until as recently as about 250,000 years ago. At that time a new type of utensil emerged in Europe, North Africa, and southwestern Asia. Called Mousterian tools , these implements were smaller hand-axes and tools made from stone flakes rather than cores. In older traditions, the flakes had been removed in order to shape the core as desired, such as into a hand-axe. But in the Mousterian tradition, sometimes the flakes were chipped off in such a way that they themselves could be used as small knives for cutting meat, scraping leather, and serving as spearheads attached to shafts ( Figure 2.9 ). Advances to the Mousterian techniques later led to other tool traditions. By around forty-five thousand years ago, humans were making a great diversity of specialized tools from stone flakes. These included a variety of scrapers as well as engraving tools for carving and carefully reshaping softer materials like bone and antler into either tools or works of art.

Another important tool of our human ancestors was fire . When exactly humans began controlling fire remains a topic of debate. There is evidence that earlier ancestors like Homo erectus used it, but we don’t know whether they were able to start fires or merely used and perpetuated those that naturally occurred. It’s clear, however, that by at least about 125,000 years ago, if not much earlier, modern humans had learned to start and control fires.

Controlled fires were useful for staying warm in cold climates, scaring off predators, and cooking meat to make it easier to consume and digest. Archaeological finds also suggest that controlled fires aided in the manufacture of certain tools. Wooden spears could be hardened in the flame, making them more effective hunting implements. Some types of stone could be treated with heat to make them easier to chip and mold. Fire also played an important social function. Gathering around the heat and light likely aided in bonding and helped build the social connections vital for cooperative activities and group survival.

Sitting around a fire may also have been an occasion for early humans to display one of their most powerful tools, the unique ability to use sounds as language. There is some speculation that earlier human ancestors like Homo erectus were able to make sound and possibly had a type of language. We’ll never know for sure. But we do know that modern humans are capable of making a great variety of different sounds. Biologists calculate that we can produce fifty different phonemes, or distinctive sounds. When strung together in a sophisticated manner, these phonemes can produce many tens of thousands of words to describe what we see, feel, do, and imagine. Beginning at least 100,000 years ago, modern humans began using language in this fashion, gaining a major advantage over competing animals. With language, they could coordinate daily tasks, work much more efficiently in groups, communicate abstract ideas, and pass important information to successive generations. Few tools aided modern humans more than their ability to communicate with complex languages.

While they left no record of their discussions, early humans did leave a number of impressive artistic depictions. The work that has survived includes small animal and human sculptures, usually made of carved bone or stone. The human-shaped items are often of large, possibly pregnant, women and might have served as symbols of fertility. There are also preserved hand prints, created by placing a hand on stone and blowing pigment around it to preserve the image of its shape.

Some of the most stunning prehistoric art still in existence today consists of cave paintings dating as far back as forty thousand years. Many painted caves have been discovered in Spain and France, but there are also examples in England, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Indonesia. The paintings in the Cave of Altamira in northern Spain are prime examples of this type of art. Within the cave, and dating to about thirty-six thousand years ago, are more than two dozen large images of animals including bison, bulls, horses, deer, and boars. Each is painted in impressive detail using combinations of charcoal and ochre (a pigment made from clay) to produce bold reds, yellows, browns, and blacks. In many instances, the artists incorporated features of the cave walls as part of their designs, giving three-dimensional shape and definition to the animals they drew ( Figure 2.10 ).

Beyond the Book

Interpreting artistic expression in the paleolithic age.

We often think of visual art as a relatively modern gesture consisting of works like oil paintings, sculptures, and even computer-designed images. But artistic expression among our species is quite ancient. We may never know how much art was produced tens of thousands of years ago; many examples have probably been lost. But what we do have is fascinating to behold, though interpreting it is much like trying to reconstruct an entire puzzle from just a few pieces.

Some of the most interesting and perplexing artistic works include a number of female images sometimes called Venus figurines . These are relatively small statuettes (one to sixteen inches in height) that were carved from stone, ivory, bone, or clay to resemble women. The tiny Venus of Hohle Fels , discovered in Germany, is the oldest such object found to date ( Figure 2.11 ). Carved from mammoth ivory, it dates to about forty thousand years ago, and what remains of it depicts a woman with large exaggerated breasts. This feature has led some anthropologists to conclude that it was intended to represent sex, reproduction, or fertility.

Similar to the Venus of Hohle Fels and also discovered in Germany is the Venus of Willendorf ( Figure 2.12 ). This female figurine, less than five inches tall, may be as much as thirty-three thousand years old. Like other such images, it shows a woman with exaggerated breasts and a stylized head with no facial features. Analysis of it has produced a number of interpretations, from the traditional representation of fertility to a type of self-portrait.

Unlike the preceding examples, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice , discovered in the modern Czech Republic, is made of ceramic ( Figure 2.13 ). It stands just under four and a half inches tall and may be as much as twenty-nine thousand years old.

Various other female figurines have been found as far from Europe as central Russia, and while individually unique, all have the same characteristics. They are small and were likely intended to be portable. They have exaggerated breasts and often show reproductive organs. They have large bellies that may reflect pregnancy. But without some record from the people who created them, their true symbolism and use will likely remain a mystery.

• Why do you think these figurines are often interpreted as being related to fertility? Do you think that interpretation is plausible? Why or why not?
• What interpretation of these figurines would you suggest, based on the information you’ve read and seen here?

The significance that cave paintings held for the people who created them may never be fully understood. It was once believed the images were designed to be popularly admired as interesting decorations, not unlike the ornaments we put in our homes today. But given that they are often deep in the dark interiors of the caves, where sunlight could not reach, this interpretation has mostly been abandoned.

With limited insight into the minds of the artists, scholars have concluded that the art likely served some unknown religious purpose. Many speculate that the caves could have been used by shamans—men and women thought to have a special knowledge of the spiritual world—who might have crawled deep into the interior to commune in ceremonies with a type of spiritual force. Such interpretations remain little more than educated guesses. What is indisputable is that the art demonstrates that even tens of thousands of years ago humans had the unique ability to reproduce the world around them in complex, symbolic fashion, through images we can immediately recognize today.

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The first migrations out of Africa

• Author(s) Beth Blaxland, Fran Dorey
• Updated 04/03/20
• Read time 2 minutes
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About 2 million years ago, the first of our ancestors moved northwards from their homelands and out of Africa.

Why did it take so long to leave Africa?

The extensive arid environments of northern Africa and the Middle East were a major barrier blocking movement out of Africa. Before they could spread out of Africa, our ancestors needed to develop physical and mental capabilities that would enable them to survive in these harsh environments where food and fresh water were highly seasonal resources.

Who left Africa first?

Homo ergaster (or African Homo erectus ) may have been the first human species to leave Africa. Fossil remains show this species had expanded its range into southern Eurasia by 1.75 million years ago. Their descendents, Asian Homo erectus , then spread eastward and were established in South East Asia by at least 1.6 million years ago.

However, an alternate theory proposes that hominins migrated out of Africa before Homo ergaster evolved, possibly about 2 million years ago, prior to the earliest dates of Homo erectus in Asia. These hominins may have been either australopithicines or, more likely, an unknown species of Homo, similar in appearance to Homo habilis. In this theory, the population found at Dmanisi represent a missing link in the evolution of Homo erectus/Homo ergaster. Perhaps too, the evolution of Homo ergaster occurred outside of Africa and there was considerable gene flow between African and Eurasian populations.

This theory has gained more support in recent years due to DNA research. Evidence from a genetic study indicates an expansion out of Africa about 1.9 million years ago and gene flow occurring between Asian and African populations by 1.5 million years ago. More physical evidence is needed from key areas in Eurasia such as Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but politics is currently making this difficult.

What made it possible to leave Africa?

While there is some debate about whether Homo ergaster was the first of our ancestors to leave Africa, they did possess the physical and cultural attributes that would have aided dispersal through the arid environments of northern Africa and the Middle East. These attributes included:

• a modern body shape with an efficient striding gait suited to travelling over long distances, although smaller statures are represented in the remains from Dmanisi
• a sufficiently developed intelligence to cope with unfamiliar environments, although did not require a brain size much bigger than Homo habilis, with an average brain size of 610cc
• improved technology to aid subsistence (Oldowan-style tools or Mode1 Technology have been found at sites in Dmanisi, Georgia, and northern China, both dating to 1.7 million years old)
• a diet that included more meat and which increased the food supply options in seasonally arid environments

Who left Africa next?

After the first early dispersals out of Africa, various other groups of early humans spread out of Africa as their populations grew. These dispersals were not regular or constant but instead occurred as waves of dispersal during periods with favourable climatic and environmental conditions.

These waves of dispersal out of Africa included movements eastward across southern Asia more than one million years ago and movements into western Europe within the last 900,000 years. Movements back into Africa also occurred.

Modern human migrations

More recently, modern humans began their dispersal out of Africa. This dispersal appears to have taken two forms - irregular occupation of the Levant and nearby sites by small populations and then migration on a mass scale.

The oldest known Homo sapiens fossils outside of Africa come from caves in Israel - Misliya (about 180,000 years old), Skhul (about 90,000 years old) and Qafzeh (about 120,000 years old). These probably represent populations that intermittently occupied the region and it is unlikely that there was direct evolutionary continuity between the Misliya and later Skhul/Qafzeh peoples. Genetic studies also support the idea of earlier dispersals of modern humans out of Africa starting from about 220,000 years ago.

There is also evidence in the form of stone tools that indicate the possibility that earlier dispersals reached beyond the Levant. Stone tools have been found in India dating to about 74,000 years old, in Yemen dating to between 70,000 and 80,000 years old, and in the United Arab Emirates dating to about 80,000 years old. Some of these tools resemble African Middle Stone Age technology, others are more like those used by Neanderthals in Europe and Homo sapiens and Neanderthals in the Levant. No human remains were found with the tools, but as Neanderthals have not been found in these regions, it is assumed the makers were modern humans.

Most experts conclude, from genetic and material evidence, that migration on a mass scale only occurred within the last 60,000 years or so.

By 100,000 years ago, humans had dispersed and diversified into at least four species. Our own species, Homo sapiens , lived in Africa and the Middle East, Homo neanderthalensis lived in Europe, and Homo floresiensis in southern Asia. DNA from human remains in Denisova cave, Russia, indicates a fourth species was also still extant when Homo sapiens was migrating through southern Asia about 60,000 years ago. Modern Melanesians have about 4% of this DNA. The species is unknown, but may be late surviving Homo heidelbergensis or a yet-to-be-discovered species. This diversity disappeared about 28,000 years ago, however, and only one human species now survives.

The Australian Museum respects and acknowledges the Gadigal people as the First Peoples and Traditional Custodians of the land and waterways on which the Museum stands.

Image credit: gadigal yilimung (shield) made by Uncle Charles  Chicka  Madden

Global Human Journey

An animated map shows humans migrating out of Africa to Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Anthropology, Geography, Human Geography, Social Studies, World History

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The video above is from the January 2013 iPad edition of  National Geographic  magazine.

Groups of modern humans— Homo sapiens —began their migration out of Africa some 60,000 years ago. Some of our early ancestors kept exploring until they spread to all corners of Earth. How far and fast they went depended on climate , the pressures of population , and the invention of boats and other technologies. Less tangible qualities also sped their footsteps: imagination, adaptability, and an innate curiosity about what lay over the next hill.

Today, geneticists are doing their own exploring. Their studies have led them to a gene variation that might point to our propensity for risk-taking, movement, change, and adventure. This gene variant, known as DRD4-7R, is carried by approximately 20 percent of the human population . Several studies tie 7R (and other variants of the DRD4 gene ) to migration . ( Genetics is complex, however. Different groups of genes interact and yield diverse results in different individuals. DRD4-7R probably influences, not causes, our tendency toward “restlessness.”)

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Review “The Global Human Journey” video, then discuss geography and genetics as posed by queries in the “Questions” tab.

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In Their Footsteps: Human Migration Out of Africa

Paul Salopek is an award-winning journalist and National Geographic Explorer, who is following the footsteps of our ancestors out of Africa. As he walks, Salopek is documenting the places he travels, the people he meets, and telling the stories of our human history, from the very earliest humans to our more recent past.

Anthropology, Archaeology, Geography, Human Geography, Social Studies, World History

Salopek and Hessan

Picture of Paul Salopek and guide Ahmed Alema Hessan outside of Bouri

Photograph by John Stanmeyer/National Geographic

Paul Salopek is an award-winning journalist and National Geographic Explorer. He is also a walker. And he is on a very long walk. One that will last at least 10 years. One some of our human ancestors took about 60,000 years ago, by some estimates. In 2013, Paul Salopek set out to walk the path some of our ancestors walked when they migrated out of Africa. He has named his expedition the Out of Eden Walk. His route will take him from Ethiopia to the Middle East, through Central and Southeast Asia, and across China. The land bridge our ancestors used to cross from Asia to North America has long since disappeared. So Salopek will take a ship across the Pacific Ocean. He will then walk through the West Coast of the United States and Mexico. He will cross Central America to South America and walk along its western coast to Tierra del Fuego—the southernmost tip of the continent. Just as some of our ancestors did, Salopek will travel mostly along the outside edges of the continents, near oceans, and seas. As he walks, Salopek is documenting the places he travels and the people he meets. Salopek is also telling the stories of our human history, from the earliest humans to our more recent past. Some of the places he has walked through have clues that can help us understand early humans and our even-earlier hominin ancestors . In the Beginning Salopek chose Herto Bouri, Ethiopia, for the starting point of the Out of Eden Walk. This desert site is a good place to start retracing the steps of early humans. It is the location of the 160,000-year-old Herto man fossil . Herto man is thought by many scientists to be the oldest fully recognizable, modern human ever found. It is one of the paths believed to have been taken by some of our early ancestors from Africa to Europe and Asia. Fossil evidence shows that these early humans made crude stone tools. They also possibly had rituals for their dead. Herto man is proof that modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) lived in Africa at least 160,000 years ago. And they seem to have stayed there for a long time. Though it is unclear when some modern humans first left Africa, evidence shows that these modern humans did not leave Africa until between 60,000 and 90,000 years ago. Most likely, a change in climate helped to push them out. Experts suggest that droughts in Africa led to starvation , and humans were driven to near extinction before they ever had a chance to explore the world. A climate shift and greening in the Middle East probably helped to draw the first humans out of Africa. Food Is Life The finding and processing of food was very important to our human ancestors . It isn’t surprising that they made tools to help them with this task. Gona, in the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia, is the earliest known stone tool site. It is littered with artifacts of 2.6-million-year-old tools. The tools found at Gona were crude, sharp objects. They weren’t made by the modern humans such as Herto man. Instead, they were created by earlier hominins . And they weren’t used to hunt the antelopes whose fossils are found scattered nearby. Scientists do not think these early hominins were brave hunters. Instead, they were likely scavengers . They used their tools to cut up carcasses and break bones to get to the nutritious bone marrow . Scientists do not know for sure how much meat these early toolmakers ate or if they cooked it. But it is likely that most of their food was plants. Settling Down Early humans were mobile. They were hunter-gatherers . But about 10,000 to 13,000 years ago, something changed. In a valley called Wadi Natuf in what is now the West Bank, in the Palestinian territories, some humans stopped their roaming and settled down in one place. They developed tools to harvest the abundant local grains. Eventually, these Natufians began to grow food instead of just gathering it. The concept of claiming land was born. The change from hunting and gathering to farming had advantages for early humans. With greater food availability, some humans were able to focus time on doing activities other than looking for food. It also enabled the establishment of larger groups of humans. But there were also disadvangtages. Mass outbreaks of infectious diseases , like today’s flu, were one of the by-products of human settlement. Large groups of people gathered in one place made it easier for disease to spread. New Understandings If you are interested in human migration , as Paul Salopek is, Dmanisi, Georgia, is an interesting place to be. A bridge between Europe and Asia, the site has been a popular crossroads for almost two million years. The evidence is in layers of archaeological remains. The 1,400-year-old remains of the medieval city of Dmanisi are found in the top layer. Below that are the remains of a 5,000-year-old Bronze Age settlement. And below that? The 1.8-million-year-old fossil remains of one of our early ancestors . They are among the earliest hominin remains found outside of Africa. These fossil remains really captured Salopek’s interest, and he visited the nearby National Museum to see them for himself. The skulls found at Dmanisi are important. Finding them changed scientists’ understanding of human evolution. The fossils showed a mixture of features from three different hominin species. This helped scientists to better understand how these species related to each other. Even more importantly, one of the skulls showed the earliest known evidence of compassionate behavior. The skull belonged to an older man. His jawbone showed that he had only one tooth while he lived. Almost two million years ago, he would not have been able to survive on his own without teeth. Yet, his bones show that he lived for years after losing them. This tells scientists that someone—another hominin —had bothered to take care of him. Something in Common The Out of Eden Walk will take Salopek at least 10 years and 33,796 kilometers (21,000 miles). He will cross five continents and more than 30 countries. Along the way, he will encounter many different languages, ethnicities, and cultures. He will hear stories from thousands of people. But everyone he talks to, from the nomadic Afar herders in Ethiopia, the refugees in Turkey, and the policeman in Pakistan, all have something in common. They share some of the same ancestors. Salopek walks the route some early humans took as they migrated out of Africa. And every person he meets along the way can trace their own ancestral path back there.

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February 9, 2024

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1969 Moon Landing

By: History.com Editors

Updated: July 17, 2023 | Original: August 23, 2018

On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin (1930-) became the first humans ever to land on the moon. About six-and-a-half hours later, Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon. As he took his first step, Armstrong famously said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." The Apollo 11 mission occurred eight years after President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) announced a national goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Apollo 17, the final manned moon mission, took place in 1972.

JFK's Pledge Leads to Start of Apollo Program

The American effort to send astronauts to the moon had its origins in an appeal President Kennedy made to a special joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961: "I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." 

At the time, the United States was still trailing the Soviet Union in space developments, and Cold War -era America welcomed Kennedy's bold proposal. In 1966, after five years of work by an international team of scientists and engineers, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conducted the first unmanned Apollo mission , testing the structural integrity of the proposed launch vehicle and spacecraft combination. 

Then, on January 27, 1967, tragedy struck at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, when a fire broke out during a manned launch-pad test of the Apollo spacecraft and Saturn rocket. Three astronauts were killed in the fire.

President Richard Nixon spoke with Armstrong and Aldrin via a telephone radio transmission shortly after they planted the American flag on the lunar surface. Nixon considered it the "most historic phone call ever made from the White House."

Despite the setback, NASA and its thousands of employees forged ahead, and in October 1968, Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, orbited Earth and successfully tested many of the sophisticated systems needed to conduct a moon journey and landing. 

In December of the same year, Apollo 8 took three astronauts to the far side of the moon and back, and in March 1969 Apollo 9 tested the lunar module for the first time while in Earth orbit. That May, the three astronauts of Apollo 10 took the first complete Apollo spacecraft around the moon in a dry run for the scheduled July landing mission.

Timeline of the 1969 Moon Landing

At 9:32 a.m. EDT on July 16, with the world watching, Apollo 11 took off from Kennedy Space Center with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins (1930-) aboard. Armstrong, a 38-year-old civilian research pilot, was the commander of the mission.

After traveling 240,000 miles in 76 hours, Apollo 11 entered into a lunar orbit on July 19. The next day, at 1:46 p.m., the lunar module Eagle, manned by Armstrong and Aldrin, separated from the command module, where Collins remained. Two hours later, the Eagle began its descent to the lunar surface, and at 4:17 p.m. the craft touched down on the southwestern edge of the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong immediately radioed to Mission Control in Houston, Texas, a now-famous message: "The Eagle has landed."

At 10:39 p.m., five hours ahead of the original schedule, Armstrong opened the hatch of the lunar module. As he made his way down the module's ladder, a television camera attached to the craft recorded his progress and beamed the signal back to Earth, where hundreds of millions watched in great anticipation.

At 10:56 p.m., as Armstrong stepped off the ladder and planted his foot on the moon’s powdery surface, he spoke his famous quote, which he later contended was slightly garbled by his microphone and meant to be "that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Aldrin joined him on the moon's surface 19 minutes later, and together they took photographs of the terrain, planted a U.S. flag, ran a few simple scientific tests and spoke with President Richard Nixon (1913-94) via Houston. 

By 1:11 a.m. on July 21, both astronauts were back in the lunar module and the hatch was closed. The two men slept that night on the surface of the moon, and at 1:54 p.m. the Eagle began its ascent back to the command module. Among the items left on the surface of the moon was a plaque that read: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon—July 1969 A.D.—We came in peace for all mankind."

At 5:35 p.m., Armstrong and Aldrin successfully docked and rejoined Collins, and at 12:56 a.m. on July 22 Apollo 11 began its journey home, safely splashing down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:50 p.m. on July 24.

How Many Times Did the US Land on the Moon?

There would be five more successful lunar landing missions, and one unplanned lunar swing-by. Apollo 13 had to abort its lunar landing due to technical difficulties. The last men to walk on the moon, astronauts Eugene Cernan (1934-2017) and Harrison Schmitt (1935-) of the Apollo 17 mission, left the lunar surface on December 14, 1972. 

The Apollo program was a costly and labor-intensive endeavor, involving an estimated 400,000 engineers, technicians and scientists, and costing $24 billion (close to $100 billion in today's dollars). The expense was justified by Kennedy's 1961 mandate to beat the Soviets to the moon, and after the feat was accomplished, ongoing missions lost their viability.

Apollo 11 Photos

HISTORY Vault: Moon Landing: The Lost Tapes

On the 50th anniversary of the historic moon landing, this documentary unearths lost tapes of the Apollo 11 astronauts, and explores the dangers and challenges of the mission to the moon.

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Art & Culture Travel Blog

History of travelling: how people started to travel.

• Tea Gudek Šnajdar
• Cultural Tourism

Although we often have a feeling like people are travelling for the last few decades only, the truth is – people are travelling for centuries. Old Romans were travelling to relax in their Mediterranean villas. At the same time, people in Eastern Asia wandered for cultural experiences. I’ve got so fascinated with the history of travelling, that I did my own little research on how people started to travel. And here is what I’ve learned.

History of travelling

I was always curious about the reason people started to travel. Was it for pure leisure? To relax? Or to learn about new cultures, and find themselves along the way?

I wanted to chaise the reason all the way to its source – to the first travellers. And hopped to find out what was the initial motivation for people to travel.

According to linguists, the word ‘travel’ was first used in the 14th century. However, people started to travel much earlier.

While looking at the history of travelling and the reasons people started to travel, I wanted to distinguish the difference between travellers and explorers. Most of the time, when thinking about travel in history, people like Marco Polo or Christopher Columbus are coming to mind. However, they weren’t really travellers in a modern sense. They were explorers and researchers. So, to really learn about how people started to travel, I wanted to focus on ordinary people. Travellers like you and me, if you wish.

Romans and their roads

First people who started to travel for enjoyment only were, I’m sure you won’t be surprised, old Romans. Wealthy Romans would often go to their summer villas. And it was purely for leisure. They could, of course, start doing that because they invented something quite crucial for travelling – roads. Well developed network of roads was the reason they could travel safely and quickly.

However, there is another reason that motivated people in Antiquity to travel. And I was quite amazed when I learned about it.

It was a desire to learn. They believed travelling is an excellent way to learn about other cultures, by observing their art, architecture and listening to their languages.

Sounds familiar? It seems like Romans were the first culture tourists.

⤷ Read more : 20 Archaeological sites you have to visit in Europe

Travelling during the Middle Ages

It may come by surprise, but people started to wander more during the Middle Ages. And most of those journeys were pilgrimages.

Religion was the centre of life back in the Middle Ages. And the only things that connected this world with the saints people were worshipping, were the relics of saints. Pilgrims would often travel to another part of the country, or even Europe to visit some of the sacred places.

The most popular destinations for all those pilgrims was Santiago de Compostela, located in northwest Spain. People would travel for thousands of kilometres to reach it. To make a journey a bit easier for them, and to earn money from the newly developed tourism, many guest houses opened along the way. Pilgrims would often visit different towns and churches on their way, and while earning a ticket to heaven, do some sightseeing, as well.

Wealthy people were travelling in the caravans or by using the waterways. What’s changing in the Middle Ages was that travel wasn’t reserved only for the rich anymore. Lower classes are starting to travel, as well. They were travelling on foot, sleeping next to the roads or at some affordable accommodations. And were motivated by religious purposes.

⤷ TIP : You can still find many of those old pilgrim’s routes in Europe. When in old parts of the cities (especially in Belgium and the Netherlands ), look for the scallop shells on the roads. They will lead you to the local Saint-Jacob’s churches. Places dedicated to that saint were always linked to pilgrims and served as stops on their long journeys. In some cities, like in Antwerp , you can follow the scallop shell trails even today.

Below you can see one of the scallop shells on a street and Saint-Jacques Church in Tournai , Belgium.

Grand Tours of the 17th century

More impoverished people continued to travel for religious reasons during the following centuries. However, a new way of travelling appeared among wealthy people in Europe.

Grand tours are becoming quite fashionable among the young aristocrats at the beginning of the 17th century. As a part of their education (hmmm… culture tourists, again?) they would go on a long journey during which they were visiting famous European cities. Such as London , Paris , Rome or Venice, and were learning about their art, history and architecture.

Later on, those grand tours became more structured, and they were following precisely the same route. Often, young students would be accompanied by an educational tutor. And just to make the things easier for them, they were allowed to have their servants with them, too.

One of those young aristocrats was a young emperor, Peter the Great of Russia. He travelled around western Europe and has spent a significant amount of his time in the Netherlands. The architecture of Amsterdam and other Dutch cities definitely inspired a layout of the new city he has built – Saint Petersburg . So, travelling definitely remains an essential part of education since Roman times.

⤷ Read more : 15 Best museums in Europe you have to visit this year

The railway system and beginning of modern travel in the 19th century

Before the railway system was invented, people mostly travelled on foot (budget travel) or by water (the first-class travel at that time). However, when in the 1840s, an extensive network of railways was built, people started to travel for fun.

Mid-19th century definitely marks a real beginning of modern tourism. It’s the time when the middle class started to grow. And they have found a way to travel easily around Europe.

It’s coming by no surprise that the first travel agency, founded by Thomas Cook in England, was established at that time, too. He was using recently developed trains together with a network of hotels to organise his first group trips.

⤷ Read more : The most interesting European myths and legends

History of travelling in the 20th century

Since then, things started to move quickly. With the development of transportation, travelling became much more accessible. Dutch ships would need around a year to travel from Amsterdam to Indonesia. Today, for the same trip, we need less than a day on a plane.

After the Second World War, with the rise of air travel, people started to travel more and more. And with the internet and all the cool apps we have on our smartphones, it’s easier than ever to move and navigate your way in a new country. Mass tourism developed in the 1960s. But, with the new millennium, we started to face the over-tourism.

We can be anywhere in the world in less than two days. And although it’s a great privilege of our time, it also bears some responsibilities. However, maybe the key is to learn from history again and do what old Romans did so well. Travel to learn, explore local history and art, and be true culture tourists.

History of Travelling , How people started to travel , Travel

Watch CBS News

Pope Francis visits Venice in first trip outside of Rome in seven months

April 28, 2024 / 3:18 PM EDT / CBS/AP

Pope Francis made his first trip out of Rome in seven months on Sunday with a visit to Venice that included an art exhibition, a stop at a prison and a Mass.

Venice has always been a place of contrasts, of breathtaking beauty and devastating fragility, where history, religion, art and nature have collided over the centuries to produce an otherworldly gem of a city. But even for a place that prides itself on its culture of unusual encounters, Francis' visit on Sunday stood out.

Francis traveled to the lagoon city to visit the Holy See's pavilion at the Biennale contemporary art show and meet with the people who created it. But because the Vatican decided to mount its exhibit in Venice's women's prison, and invited inmates to collaborate with the artists, the whole project assumed a far more complex meaning, touching on Francis' belief in the power of art to uplift and unite, and of the need to give hope and solidarity to society's most marginalized.

His trip began at the courtyard of the Giudecca prison, where he met with women inmates one by one.

"Paradoxically, a stay in prison can mark the beginning of something new, through the rediscovery of the unsuspected beauty in us and in others, as symbolized by the artistic event you are hosting and the project to which you actively contribute," Francis told them.

The 87-year-old pontiff then met with Biennale artists in the prison chapel, decorated with an installation by Brazilian visual artist Sonia Gomes of objects dangling from the ceiling, meant to draw the viewer's gaze upward.

The Vatican exhibit has turned the Giudecca prison, a former convent for reformed prostitutes, into one of the must-see attractions of this year's Biennale, even though to see it visitors must reserve in advance and go through a security check. It has become an unusual art world darling that greets visitors at the entrance with Maurizio Cattelan's wall mural of  two giant filthy feet , a work that recalls Caravaggio's dirty feet or the feet that Francis washes each year in a Holy Thursday ritual that he routinely performs on prisoners.

The exhibit also includes a short film starring the inmates and Zoe Saldana, and prints in the prison coffee shop by onetime Catholic nun and American social activist Corita Kent.

Francis' dizzying morning visit, which ended with Mass in St. Mark's Square, represented an increasingly rare outing for the 87-year-old pontiff, who has been hobbled by health and mobility problems that have ruled out any foreign trips so far this year.

"Venice, which has always been a place of encounter and cultural exchange, is called to be a sign of beauty available to all," Francis said. "Starting with the least, a sign of fraternity and care for our common home."

During an encounter with young people at the iconic Santa Maria della Salute basilica, Francis acknowledged the miracle that is Venice, admiring its "enchanting beauty" and tradition as a place of East-West encounter, but warning that it is increasingly vulnerable to climate change and depopulation.

"Venice is at one with the waters upon which it sits," Francis said. "Without the care and safeguarding of this natural environment, it might even cease to exist."

in the exhibit as tour guides and as protagonists in some of the artworks.

Ahead of his trip, Francis sat down with "CBS Evening News" anchor and managing editor Norah O'Donnell during an hourlong interview at the guest house where he lives in Rome. 

During the interview, Francis pleaded for peace worldwide amid the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza .

"Please. Countries at war, all of them, stop the war. Look to negotiate. Look for peace," said the pope, speaking through a translator.

He also had a message for those who do not see a place for themselves in the Catholic Church anymore. 

"I would say that there is always a place, always. If in this parish the priest doesn't seem welcoming, I understand, but go and look elsewhere, there is always a place," he said. "Do not run away from the Church. The Church is very big. It's more than a temple ... you shouldn't run away from her."

The pope's Venice trip was the first of four planned inside Italy in the next three months, Reuters reported. He is scheduled to visit Verona in May and Trieste in July, and is expected to attend the June summit of Group of Seven (G7) leaders in Bari.

In September, he is also set to embark on the longest foreign trip of his papacy, traveling to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Singapore.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

An extended version of O'Donnell's interview with Pope Francis will air on "60 Minutes" on Sunday, May 19 at 7 p.m. ET. On Monday, May 20, CBS will broadcast an hourlong primetime special dedicated to the papal interview at 10 p.m. ET on the CBS Television Network and streaming on  Paramount+ . Additionally, CBS News and Stations will carry O'Donnell's interview across platforms. 

• Pope Francis
• Catholic Church

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U.S. tourist faces 12 years in prison after taking ammunition to Turks and Caicos

An Oklahoma man faces up to 12 years in prison on a Caribbean island after customs officials found ammunition in his luggage.

Ryan Watson traveled to Turks and Caicos with his wife, Valerie, to celebrate his 40th birthday on April 7. They went with two friends who had also turned 40.

The vacation came to an abrupt end when airport staff members found a zip-close bag containing bullets in the couple's carry-on luggage. Watson said it was hunting ammunition he had accidentally brought with him — but under a strict law in Turks and Caicos, a court may still impose a mandatory 12-year sentence.

"They were hunting ammunition rounds that I use for whitetail deer," Watson told NBC Boston in an interview conducted last week that aired after their first court appearance Tuesday.

"I recognized them, and I thought, 'Oh, man, what a bonehead mistake that I had no idea that those were in there,'" he said.

The couple were arrested and charged with possession of ammunition. Authorities seized their passports and explained the penalties they faced.

Valerie Watson said in the interview: "When I heard that, I immediately was terrified, because I was like we can't both be in prison for 12 years. We have kids at home, and this is such an innocent mistake."

The charges against her were dropped, and she returned home to Oklahoma City on Tuesday after the court hearing to be reunited with her two young children.

"Our goal is to get Ryan home, because we can’t be a family without Dad," she said.

The couple also spoke about the financial burden of a much longer-than-planned trip. "This is something that we may never recover from," Ryan Watson said.

The U.S. Embassy in the Bahamas issued a warning to travelers in September about a law that strongly prohibits possession of firearms or ammunition in Turks and Caicos, an overseas British territory southeast of the Bahamas that is a popular vacation spot.

It said: "We wish to remind all travelers that declaring a weapon in your luggage with an airline carrier does not grant permission to bring the weapon into TCI [Turks and Caicos Islands] and will result in your arrest."

The embassy added: "If you bring a firearm or ammunition into TCI, we will not be able to secure your release from custody."

The embassy and the government in Turks and Caicos did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The same thing happened to another American, Bryan Hagerich, of Pennsylvania, who was arrested after ammunition was found in his luggage before he tried to board a flight out of Turks and Caicos in February. He said he accidentally left it in his bag.

Hagerich was on a family vacation with his wife and two young children but has now been in the country for 70 days. He spent eight days in prison before he posted bail.

"It’s incredibly scary. You know, you just don’t know what the next day may bring — you know, what path this may take," Hagerich told NBC Boston.

"You know, it’s certainly a lot different than packing your bags and going away with your family for a few days. It’s been the worst 70 days of my life," he said.

Hagerich, once a professional baseball player, was drafted by the Florida Marlins in the MLB 2007 June amateur draft from the University of Delaware.

His case goes to trial May 3.

Patrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.

Destructive tornadoes in America's heartland kill 5 across 2 states during worst outbreak of 2024

There have been more than 100 confirmed tornadoes ranging from ef-0 to ef-4 since thursday, and that number could continue to rise as survey teams from the national weather service are still out looking at the damage left behind..

Number of confirmed tornadoes from deadly weekend outbreak jumps to more than 100

The number of confirmed tornadoes from a weekend outbreak has jumped to more than 100 as recovery efforts continue across America’s heartland.

A severe weather outbreak barreled across America’s heartland over the weekend, producing dozens of tornadoes that tore through communities from Texas to Iowa and left at least five people dead as thousands of residents are now in the process of sifting through the debris of destroyed homes and businesses trying to recover whatever belongings remain.

Since the event began Thursday, there have been more than 100 confirmed tornadoes ranging from EF-0 to EF-4 , and that number could continue to rise as survey teams from the National Weather Service are still out in full force looking at the damage left behind.

DRONE VIDEO SHOWS SULPHUR, OKLAHOMA, NEARLY UNRECOGNIZABLE AFTER DIRECT HIT FROM TORNADO

Images from Christy Morris, owner of The Mix Mercantile, show the destruction after the Sulphur, Oklahoma tornado on April 28, 2024.

(Christy Morris)

Friday was the most active tornado day of 2024 , with the NWS saying it received 88 tornado reports – the most in a single day since March 31, 2023, when 161 were reported.

In addition to the dozens of Tornado Warnings that were issued in Iowa and Nebraska on Friday, two rare Tornado Emergencies were issued.

Those tornadoes produced catastrophic damage in cities such as Elkhorn in Nebraska and Minden in Iowa, and specialized response teams have been brought in to help survey the destruction.

IOWA TROOPER SURVIVES TORNADO IN CAR, PATCHES WINDOW AND CONTINUES HELPING VICTIMS

Man killed while sheltering from storm in Minden

Iowa town decimated by tornado

FOX Weather's Brandy Campbell visited decimated Minden, Iowa, the day after a tornado tore through the town. She talks to residents Sherri Guerrero and Randy Davis about how they survived. Governor Kim Reynolds explains that Mayor Ken Zimmerman was a survivor as well.

Sirens wailed and phones screeched, alerting people to the dangers that were approaching as a massive wedge tornado was inching closer to the town of Minden, Iowa.

But despite the preparations and people seeking shelter, the monster storm killed at least one person .

VIOLENT, WEDGE-SHAPED TORNADO SLAMS RURAL COMMUNITIES IN IOWA: ‘PRAYED EVERYTHING WOULD BE OK’

Damage left behind after a tornado swept through Elkhorn, Nebraska on April 26, 2024.

(Nicole Valdes / FOX Weather)

The Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management Department confirmed that a man died Saturday from injuries he sustained during Friday’s tornado outbreak.

Family members told local media that the man was trapped in his basement after the tornado. First responders were able to free the man and rush him to a local hospital, but he succumbed to his injuries.

NEIGHBORHOODS AROUND OMAHA, NEBRASKA, DEVASTATED BY LARGE TORNADO

At least 4 dead, including infant, in Oklahoma

Drone video shows stretch of Sulphur, Oklahoma downtown after devastating tornado

First light tornado damage from Sulphur, Oklahoma was seen on April 28, 2024. Drone footage shows destroyed businesses and homes, as well as cars thrown and turned over from an intense tornado that passed through the town.

At least four people were killed and more than 100 others were injured in Oklahoma during a tornado outbreak there on Saturday.

Two deaths were reported in the community of Holdenville , including an infant. A GoFundMe has since been set up to benefit the family that is now grieving the loss of their child.

"Words can't express the immense loss this family has suffered," the GoFundMe reads. According to the fundraiser, the family also lost their home, two vehicles and all of their belongings.

Funerals delayed for two tornado victims as flooding rains soaked the community in mourning

FOX Weather's Katie Byrne reports from Holdenville, Oklahoma, a community reeling after a tornado struck Saturday killing a baby and a man. Flooding rains following the twister left the ground soaked and will delay burying the victims.

FOX Weather Correspondent Katie Byrne was in Holdenville and spoke with the family of one of the victims, Jimmy Johnson. They told her that he was able to protect his niece and nephew, who were at the home with him when the tornado destroyed it.

One funeral home is taking care of both funerals for grieving families but said recent rain has made the ground too saturated to hold those funerals right now.

"We just came out here to get a lay of the land and see what we have to do as far as interment for the ones that passed away," Anthony Wood said. "It looks like somebody set a bomb off."

HOW TO WATCH FOX WEATHER

This image shows major damage to a building in Marietta, Oklahoma, on Sunday, April 28, 2024.

(KTVT / FOX Weather)

At a news conference on Sunday, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said two additional deaths were reported in the state – one in Marietta and another in the hard-hit community of Sulphur .

"Definitely the most damage since I've been governor that I've seen," Stitt said during a news conference Sunday in Sulphur. "I've seen a lot of damage. I've been around the state for, this is my sixth year, but what I saw in downtown Sulphur is unbelievable."

The tornado that hit Sulphur tore through the downtown area, destroying nearly every business on West Muskogee Avenue. FOX Weather Correspondent Brandy Campbell was in the devastated community on Monday and said buildings are continuing to crumble as the wind blows, and the area has been closed off to the public for safety reasons.

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Watch: Buildings destroyed, trucks mangled after tornado strikes Marietta, Oklahoma

Video recorded in Marietta, Oklahoma, shows catastrophic damage left behind when a tornado ripped through the community on Saturday, April 27, 2024.

Storm surveys are continuing in Oklahoma, but forecasters with the NWS said preliminary assessments found damage consistent with EF-3 tornadoes in Sulphur and Holdenville. NWS officials said that EF-4 damage was found in Marietta.

Stitt issued an executive order on Sunday morning declaring a state of emergency in Carter, Cotton, Garfield, Hughes, Kay, Lincoln, Love, Murray, Okfuskee, Oklahoma, Payne and Pontotoc counties because of the damage left behind in the wake of the severe weather on Saturday.

Watch: Ambulances race down I-35 in Marietta, Oklahoma, after tornado

Video recorded on Interstate 35 in Marietta, Oklahoma, shows damage left behind when a tornado moved through on Saturday, April, 27, 2024.

"There is hereby a declared a disaster emergency caused by the severe storms, tornadoes, straight-line winds , hail and flooding in the State of Oklahoma that threatens the lives and property of the people of this State and the public’s peace, health and safety ," the executive order read.

The executive order will remain in effect for the next 30 days.

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When Did Humans Come to the Americas?

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists

Guy Gugliotta

For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.

For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.

Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of Natural History opened a formal excavation in one particular sink. Below a layer of undisturbed sediment they found nine stone flakes that a person must have chipped from a larger stone, most likely to make tools and projectile points. They also found a mastodon tusk, scarred by circular cut marks from a knife. The tusk was 14,500 years old.

The age was surprising, even shocking, for it suddenly made the Aucilla sinkhole one of the earliest places in the Americas to betray the presence of human beings. Curiously, though, scholars largely ignored the discoveries of the Aucilla River Prehistory Project, instead clinging to the conviction that America’s earliest settlers arrived more recently, some 13,500 years ago. But now the sinkhole is getting a fresh look, along with several other provocative archaeological sites that show evidence of an earlier human presence in the Americas, perhaps much earlier.

Which is why I found myself on the banks of the Aucilla with Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University. A tall, unassuming 57-year-old, with an easy confidence honed during more than 30 years in the field, he had organized archaeologists and divers to gather more evidence of the sinkhole’s role in prehistory. “This site is as old as anything in North America,” Waters said. “The context is fine, and the dating is fine, but people just looked at it and said, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting,’ and that was it. It had a lot of potential, but it was in limbo. We’re here to confirm the earlier work, and if we’re lucky, we’ll find some more artifacts.”

Waters’s team, led by Texas A&M underwater archaeologist Jessi Halligan, worked at the Page-Ladson sink, named for Buddy Page, who discovered it, and John Ladson, the property’s owner. The sink lies 30 feet below the opaque surface of the Aucilla, which, following heavy rains, was dyed nearly black by humus from the hardwood hammock. Fish were jumping in the water, while birds, turtles and the occasional gator patrolled nearby. Were it not for Halligan’s divers, there would be no human presence and the silence would be absolute.

Underwater archaeological sites are staked out and marked in meter-square quadrants, just like open-air excavations. The mud, troweled away by one diver, was fed into the mouth of a four-inch suction dredge held by a second diver. The dredge discharged into a pair of mesh screens mounted on a skiff moored in midstream. Big pieces—stones, bones, leaves and perhaps human artifacts—collected on the top screen, a quarter-inch mesh, and the small stuff was caught by the sixteenth-inch mesh below.

First the researchers had to clear the site of the detritus that had accumulated in the 15 years since the first excavation ended. Then, to reach the most promising level, divers removed a ten-foot layer of clay that overlay it. The work was tedious—“like diving in dark roast coffee,” said James Dunbar, an archaeologist and member of the original Aucilla team who’d returned for a second look—but the blanket of sediment guaranteed the site’s integrity. Everything below the sediment was as old as the people who left it there. In the oxygen-deprived deposits within the Aucilla mud, nothing decays.

Working in the Stygian gloom with lamps and suction pumps, the divers unearthed a number of small bone fragments, the fist-size vertebra of a large mammal and a manhole cover-size shoulder blade that might have belonged to the same mastodon whose tusk bore the cut marks of the ancient hunters. Also recovered in the fine-mesh screen were many pounds of mastodon digesta, the remains of vegetation that the six-ton beast ground to a mulch-like texture and swallowed.

The observations the researchers made in their days at the sinkhole validated the original excavation. (And on a subsequent expedition they found more mastodon bones.) Each new discovery generated fresh enthusiasm. “All we need now,” said Halligan, “are more human artifacts.”

About 100,000 years ago, modern human beings started spreading out from their initial homeland in Africa to occupy Europe, Asia and, by sea, even Australia, displacing or absorbing Neanderthals and other archaic hominid species. That diaspora took about 70,000 years, and when it was completed our ancestors stood triumphant.

The peopling of the Americas, scholars tend to agree, happened sometime in the past 25,000 years. In what might be called the standard view of events, a wave of big game hunters crossed into the New World from Siberia at the end of the last ice age, when the Bering Strait was a land bridge that had emerged after glaciers and continental ice sheets froze enough of the world’s water to lower sea level as much as 400 feet below what it is today.

The key question is precisely when the migration occurred. To be sure, there were constraints imposed by North America’s glacial history. Researchers suggest that it happened sometime after gradual warming began 25,000 years ago during the depths of the ice age, but well before a severe cold snap reversed the trend 12,900 years ago. Early in this window, when the weather was very cold, migration by boat was more likely because immense expanses of ice would have turned an overland journey into a nightmarish ordeal. Later, however, the ice receded, opening up plausible land bridges for trekkers coming across the Bering Strait.

For decades the most compelling evidence of this standard view consisted of distinctive, exquisitely crafted, grooved bifacial projectile points, called “Clovis points” after the New Mexico town near where they were first discovered in 1929. With the aid of radiocarbon dating in the 1950s, archaeologists determined that the Clovis sites were 13,500 years old. This came as little surprise, for the first Clovis points were found in ancient campsites along with the remains of mammoth and ice age bison, creatures that researchers knew had died out thousands of years ago. But the discovery dramatically undermined the prevailing wisdom that human beings and these ice age “megafauna” did not exist in America at the same time. Scholars flocked to New Mexico to see for themselves.

The idea that the Clovis people, as they came to be known, were the first Americans quickly won over the research community. “The evidence was unequivocal,” said Ted Goebel, a colleague of Waters at the Center for the Study of the First Americans. Clovis sites, it turned out, were spread all over the continent, and “there was a clear association of the fauna with hundreds, if not thousands, of artifacts,” Goebel said. “Again and again it was the full picture.”

Furthermore, the earliest Clovis dates corresponded roughly to the right geological moment—after the ice age warming, before the great cold snap. The northern ice had receded far enough so incoming settlers could curl around to the eastern slope of North America’s coastal mountains and hike south along an ice-free corridor between the cordilleran mountain glaciers to the west and the huge Laurentide ice sheet that swaddled much of Canada to the east. “It was a very nice package, and that’s what sealed the deal,” Goebel said. “Clovis as the first Americans became the standard, and it’s really a high bar.”

When they reached the temperate prairies, the migrants found an environment far different from what we know today—both fantastic and terrifying. There were mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, camels, bison, lions, saber-toothed cats, cheetahs, dire wolves weighing 150 pounds, eight-foot beavers and short-faced bears that stood more than six feet tall on all fours and weighed 1,800 pounds. Clovis points, finely made and strong, were well suited for hunting large animals.

The hunters spread through the United States and Mexico, the story went, pursuing prey until too few animals remained to support them in the last cold snap. Radiocarbon dates show that most of the megafauna became extinct around 12,700 years ago. The Clovis points disappeared then as well, perhaps because there were no longer any large animals to hunt.

The Clovis theory, over time, acquired the force of dogma. “We all learned it as undergraduates,” Waters recalled. Any artifacts that scholars said came before Clovis, or competing theories that cast doubt on the Clovis-first idea, were ridiculed by the archaeological establishment, discredited as bad science or ignored.

Take South America. In the late 1970s, the U.S. archaeologist Tom D. Dillehay and his Chilean colleagues began excavating what appeared to be an ancient settlement on a creek bank at Monte Verde, in southern Chile. Radiocarbon readings on organic material collected from the ruins of a large tent-like structure showed that the site was 14,800 years old, predating Clovis finds by more than 1,000 years. The 50-foot-long main structure, made of wood with a hide roof, was divided into what appeared to be individual spaces, each with a separate hearth. Outside was a second, wishbone-shaped structure that apparently contained medicinal plants. Mastodons were butchered nearby. The excavators found cordage, stone choppers and augers and wooden planks preserved in the bog, along with plant remains, edible seeds and traces of wild potatoes. Significantly, though, the researchers found no Clovis points. That posed a challenge: either Clovis hunters went to South America without their trademark weapons (highly unlikely) or people settled in South America even before the Clovis people arrived.

There must have been “people somewhere in the Americas 15,000 or 16,000 years ago, or perhaps as long as 18,000 years ago,” said Dillehay, now at Vanderbilt University.

Of the researchers working sites that seemed to precede Clovis people, Dillehay was singled out for special criticism. He was all but ostracized by Clovis advocates for years. When he was invited to meetings, speakers stood up to denounce Monte Verde. “It’s not fun when people write to your dean and try to get you fired,” he recalled. “And then your grad students try to get jobs and they can’t get jobs.”

The Monte Verde site gained wider acceptance after a panel of well-known archaeologists visited it in 1997 and reached a consensus. Dillehay was pleased that the panel had verified the integrity of his team’s work, “but it was a small group of people,” he said, meaning others in the profession continued to harbor doubts.

Two years later, an independent archaeologist, Stuart Fiedel, denounced Monte Verde’s authenticity in Scientific American Discovering Archaeology . Dillehay “fails to provide even the most basic” information about the locations of “key artifacts” at Monte Verde, Fiedel wrote. “Unless and until numerous discrepancies in the final report are convincingly clarified, this site should not be construed as conclusive proof of a pre-Clovis occupation in South America.”

The skepticism lingers. Gary Haynes, a University of Nevada-Reno anthropologist and a Clovis advocate, is not convinced. “There are only a few artifacts, and no flakes,” he said of Monte Verde, citing some of Fiedel’s arguments. “There are a lot of things that have been interpreted as artifacts but don’t look like them. Many of the things may not be the same age, because it is difficult to know exactly where they were found in the site.”

Dillehay rebuffs the criticisms: “More than 1,500 pages were published on Monte Verde, which is five times more than were ever written on any other site in the Americas, including Clovis. All of the artifacts came from the same surface covered by the peat bog and they all made sense in terms of the site’s activities. The vast majority are flaked pebble tools, typical of South American unifacial technologies. North Americans impose their evaluations on South America without even knowing the data down south.” He went on, “Now the field has moved on, and there are numerous pre-Clovis sites that have come to the forefront.”

At the Buttermilk Creek Complex archaeological site north of Austin, Texas, in a layer of earth beneath a known Clovis excavation, researchers led by Waters over the past several years found 15,528 pre-Clovis artifacts—most of them toolmaking chert flakes, but also 56 chert tools. Using optically stimulated luminescence, a technique that analyzes light energy trapped in sediment particles to identify the last time the soil was exposed to sunlight, they found that the oldest artifacts dated to 15,500 years ago—some 2,000 years older than Clovis. The work “confirms the emerging view that people occupied the Americas before Clovis,” the researchers concluded in Science in 2011. In Waters’ view, the people who made the oldest artifacts were experimenting with stone technology that, over time, may have developed further into Clovis-style tools.

Waters recently landed other blows to the Clovis orthodoxy in collaboration with Thomas Stafford, president of the Colorado-based Stafford Research Laboratories. In one series of experiments using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), a dating technique that is more precise than earlier radiocarbon measurements, they reanalyzed a mastodon rib from a skeleton previously recovered in Manis, Washington, and found to have a projectile point lodged in it. The original radiocarbon tests had surrounded the discovery in controversy because they showed it to be 13,800 years old—centuries older than Clovis. The new AMS tests confirmed that age estimate date, and DNA analysis showed that the projectile point was mastodon bone.

Deploying AMS technology, Waters and Stafford also retested many known Clovis samples from around the country, some collected decades earlier. The results, Waters said, “blew me away.” Instead of a culture spanning about 700 years, the analysis shrunk the Clovis window to 13,100 to 12,800 years ago. This new time frame required the Siberian hunters to negotiate the ice-free corridor, settle two continents and put the megafauna on the road to extinction within 300 years, an incredible feat. “Not possible,” Waters said. “You’ve got people in South America at the same time as Clovis, and the only way they could have gotten down there that fast is if they transported like ‘Star Trek.’ ”

But Haynes, of the University of Nevada-Reno, disagrees. “Think of a small number of very mobile people covering a lot of ground,” he suggests. “They could have been walking thousands of kilometers per year.”

Goebel, of the Texas A&M Center for the Study of the First Americans, characterizes his attitude toward pre-Clovis finds as “acceptance with reservation.” He said he’s disturbed by “nagging” shortcomings. Each of the older sites appears to be one-of-a-kind, he said, without a “demonstrated pattern across a region.” With Clovis, he adds, it is clear that the original sites were part of something bigger. The absence of a consistent pre-Clovis pattern “is one of the things that has hung up a lot of people, including myself.”

The discovery of numerous artifacts that pre-date Clovis has, over the years, required scholars to come up with different ideas about not only when people arrived in the Americas but how they got here. For instance, if they were already established 14,800 years ago, they must not have used the famed ice-free corridor through North America: Researchers say that it would not appear for another 1,000 years.

Maybe the first Americans didn’t walk here but came in small boats and followed the coastline, some researchers say. That possibility was first suggested in the 1950s with the discovery of Clovis-era human bones—but no artifacts—on Santa Rosa Island in the Santa Barbara Channel off the California coast. Over the past decade, though, a joint University of Oregon-Smithsonian team of archaeologists unearthed dozens of stemmed and barbed projectile points from Santa Rosa and other Channel Islands, along with the remains of fish, shellfish, seabirds and seals. Radiocarbon dates showed much of the organic material was about 12,000 years old, roughly within the Clovis time frame.

The findings do not prove that the continent’s first settlers came by sea, of course. The islands were only about four miles offshore at the time, and could have been visited by people who’d settled on the mainland. Still, the sites establish that these island dwellers were seafarers of a sort and accustomed to a seafood diet.

Jon Erlandson, a University of Oregon archaeologist, and Torben Rick, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, propose a pre-Clovis “kelp highway” for coast-hugging seamen skirting the southern edge of the Bering land bridge on their way from northeast Asia to the New World. “People came between 15,000 and 16,000 years ago” by sea, and “could eat the same seaweed and seafood as they moved along the coastline in boats,” Erlandson said. “It seems logical.” The notion that ancient people could travel great distances by boat isn’t far-fetched; many anthropologists believe that humans voyaged from the Asian mainland to Australia 45,000 years ago.

Though Erlandson said he’s convinced that the Clovis people were not the first in the Americas, he acknowledged that definitive proof of a pre-Clovis coastal route may never be found: Whatever beach settlements existed in those days of especially low sea level were long ago submerged or swept away by Pacific tides.

Moreover, the Channel Islands projectiles have nothing in common with Clovis points, as Erlandson pointed out. They appear to be related to a different toolmaking approach called the western stemmed tradition; featuring stems of different shapes that attach the projectile points to spears or darts, they were prevalent in the Pacific Northwest and the Great Basin. And they do not have the fluting characteristic of Clovis. Those observa­tions strengthen the view that other tool-making human cultures were present in the Americas at the same time as the Clovis people, and in all likelihood beforehand as well.

The link between the Channel Islands artifacts and the western stemmed tradition recently acquired greater significance: Inside the Paisley Caves in Oregon, scientists excavated similar points that were associated with organic material yielding radiocarbon dates 13,000 years old—contemporary with Clovis.

The University of Oregon’s Dennis L. Jenkins, who led the Paisley excavation, re-examined a site first explored in the 1930s. The earlier documentation (photographs and some film) was insufficient to show a definite association between the bones and artifacts. But soon, he said, “we had artifacts and we had the bones” from the site. To determine if the human artifacts were the same age as the animal remains, the researchers conducted radiocarbon dating tests on human coprolites—petrified feces—extracting carbon residue from the organic material digested long ago. They also analyzed human mitochondrial DNA in the sample, probably shed from the intestinal wall, and determined that it came from a modern human with an apparently Asian genome. The toolmakers had lived 13,000 years ago.

“And there is nothing connecting this to any Clovis site,” Jenkins said. “You have two technologies existing at the same time in North America, and there is no direct immediate relationship.”

To answer critics, Jenkins and his team tested the DNA of project participants, to make sure they had not contaminated the coprolites, and tested the sediments surrounding the coprolites for modern rodent urine and other telltale signs the area had been tainted. They found no evidence of contemporary animal or human DNA.

Jenkins and his colleagues published the final results this year and closed the site: “We’ve gotten to the bottom,” he said. “We’ve convinced the people who are willing to be convinced that the caves are as old as Clovis, if not older.”

Perhaps the most radical scholarly work suggests the Americas were colonized first by immigrants from Europe several thousand years before Clovis. The theory is the brainchild of Dennis Stanford, a curator of North American archaeology at the National Museum of Natural History, and Bruce Bradley, an archaeologist at Britain’s University of Exeter. In their 2012 book Across Atlantic Ice , they suggest that these Europeans reached the New World more than 20,000 years ago, settled in the eastern United States, developed the Clovis technology over several thousand years, then spread across the continent.

This theory is based partly on similarities between Clovis points and finely crafted “laurel leaf” points from Europe’s Solutrean culture, which flourished in southwestern France and northern Spain between 24,000 and 17,000 years ago. Stanford and Bradley argue that artifacts found at Page-Ladson, as well as other pre-Clovis sites, including the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in western Pennsylvania and the sand dunes of Cactus Hill in southeastern Virginia, have similarities to Solutrean technologies.

The Solutreans, whose territory on the European continent was apparently rather compact, may have been forced by encroaching glaciers and extreme cold to cluster on the Atlantic coast. At some point, Stanford and Bradley say, the stresses of overpopulation may have forced some Solutreans to escape by sea. They headed north and west beneath the Atlantic ice sheet to nudge into North America at the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.

Stanford and Bradley say evidence for the Solutreans’ presence in America includes stone artifacts gathered by archaeologists at several sites on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, all producing dates more than 20,000 years old. Most of the dates were derived from organic material found with the artifacts. The exception was a mastodon tusk with attached bone and teeth netted by a fisherman in 1974, along with a laurel leaf-shaped stone knife. Stanford found the tusk to be 22,760 years old. Among other things, the Solutrean hypothesis provides context not only for the Clovis people, but also for North America’s pre-Clovis sites. And it does not rule out Bering Sea migrations—those could have happened, too.

“Solutrean evolved into Clovis over close to 13,000 years,” Stanford said, and the Clovis hunters began migrating westward when the cold snap brought dry, windy, inhospitable weather to the East Coast.

But the archaeological evidence found so far in support of a European migration more than 20,000 years ago has raised skepticism. And as is the case with the kelp highway, many sites that could prove or disprove the hypothesis are now underwater. Dillehay said he had found the idea of an Atlantic crossing worthy of further investigation, even though “the hard evidence is not yet there.”

Waters, of Texas A&M, is skeptical. “I’m looking for clean evidence,” he said. “We’re past ‘Clovis first,’ and we’re developing a new model. You read the literature and you use your imagination, but then you have to go out and find the empirical evidence to support your hypothesis.”

None of the doubts expressed by critics have stopped Stanford and Bradley, veterans of the Clovis wars, from pushing forward. “Solutrean people became more and more efficient in exploiting the rich sea margin resources,” they write in Across Atlantic Ice . “Eventually their range expansion led them to a whole new world in the west.”

These days Waters says his research focuses on pre-Clovis or likely pre-Clovis sites where more information can be obtained. Unlike many of his colleagues, Waters isn’t captive to peer reviewers at granting agencies; the Center for the Study of the First Americans also has its own funding. “In the past you’d propose something and send it out for review, and the Clovis people would shoot it down,” he said.

It was against the backdrop of renewed enthusiasm for findings predating Clovis settlements that Waters reopened the Page-Ladson site on the Aucilla River. For Waters, the debate about Clovis “is finished,” he said over breakfast one morning in Perry, Florida, before we went out to the Aucilla site. “The objective everywhere we go is to learn more about pre-Clovis by doing good science. I’m investigating the first Americans.” If some folks don’t want to believe it, he added, “that’s up to them.”

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Insider Q&A: Avelo Airlines CEO Andrew Levy describes the challenges of starting a new carrier

It’s not easy to break into the U.S. airline industry, which is dominated by four big carriers and a sprinkling of other niche players, but that didn’t scare away Andrew Levy.

Neither did a pandemic that briefly caused air travel to plummet more than 90%.

In April 2021, while COVID-19 still raged and billions of dollars from taxpayers were propping up big airlines, Levy launched Avelo Airlines with flights between Burbank, California, and Las Vegas.

The airline saves money by flying older Boeing 737 jets that can be bought at relatively low prices. It operates out of less-crowded and less-costly secondary airports, and flies routes that are ignored by the big airlines.

Levy was involved in the launch of ValuJet, which became Allegiant Air, and he also did a stint as the chief financial officer of United Airlines before starting Avelo (it rhymes with yellow).

He spoke with The Associated Press about the challenges of starting a new airline, how the carrier is doing, and plans to sell shares to the public. The answers were edited for length and clarity.

Q: Why did you think you should start a new airline?

A: Shortly after I left Allegiant in 2014, I actually started thinking about about doing this. The market had become very consolidated, and there was a lot of opportunity that was out there that wasn’t being served by the existing, incumbent carriers. You have these four behemoths that are massive, that are protected by the government it seems, because certainly they’re stronger than they have ever been, after the pandemic. My view was we had room for more.

Q: What have you learned?

A: While there are these four behemoths, the toughest challenge, quite honestly, might even be the regulatory regime. For smaller companies like ours, it imposes these really substantial burdens on us. I’ll give you an example. For the (Department of Justice) lawsuit (against) JetBlue and Spirit, we had to go spend a ton of money on our end to produce documents for something that we really didn’t care how it ended up. And they’re trying to get us to do the same thing for Alaska-Hawaiian, which again, we could care less if Alaska and Hawaiian merge.

Q: How do you get people to fly on a new airline?

A: Number one, you have an awareness issue. You want people to know that you exist. So that’s one challenge, which is more of a marketing challenge. The other challenge is of course getting people to trust you. Like, ‘Who are these people? Are they going to really get me there? What’s the airplane going to look like? Is it safe? Is it reliable? What happens if something goes wrong?’ All those questions that most consumers may have when they think about choosing an airline that perhaps they’re unfamiliar with. You just have to focus on doing a really great job. Obviously not every flight is on time, but as time goes on I think people recognize that, hey, you know what? These guys offer a lot of value. We offer great convenience.

Q: Where does the name, Avelo, come from?

A: There’s no great story there. I wish I could tell you it was. It was a play on two words: velocity, which is swift in Latin, and convenience.

Q: Avelo reported a profit for fourth quarter 2023 but gave no details. Was that on a GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) basis? And how much was it?

A: We actually have cash that generates interest income nowadays. Those are GAAP numbers where we have audited financials from Ernst & Young. These are real numbers with no adjustments or anything else. I’m not going to give you the numbers because we are a private company and so we have no real need to provide that kind of information. I’ll tell you that we made money in the first quarter as well.

Q: You've talked about your cost advantage as a startup. Is that sustainable?

A: Most costs creep up over time for every airline because our labor costs are tied to pay scales, but it is very sustainable. It’s based on how we designed the business. We distribute our product directly to the customer so we don’t use third-party intermediaries. We go in to smaller, more convenient, less-expensive airports. Your taxi times are lower; you’re not burning gas. We spend money on things that matter, and that includes our people. Our pilot pay is very competitive. It’s not the same as United Airlines, but it’s extremely competitive. We operate older equipment also — midlife (Boeing) 737 NGs, and those are certainly less expensive than brand-new aircraft. They burn a little bit more gas, but not much, and we like that trade.

Q: Do you plan to sell stock to the public, and when?

There’s obviously two issues. The single biggest one is one we don’t control, which is when are the IPO markets going to be actually open and vibrant, and they’re not right now. Beyond that, we have to be ready as a company. We put two straight quarters of profits ... so we expect every quarter this year to be profitable. We hope that we’ll have a company that people would want to own, and hopefully by year end or sometime next year. There’s no magic to being public for us. It’s just that historically that is typically the best way to access the capital markets for companies like ours. It is a very capital-intensive industry.

Q: What advice would you give to somebody else looking to start a business?

A: There’s nothing more rewarding than taking control of of your destiny. Just make sure you know what you think you know about whatever it is you’re going to start. I think you have to be wired a certain way to want to do something like this because it’s unbelievably difficult. I’ve been at this now for almost six years. When we get to a certain point, I’ll look back and feel really good about what we’ve done. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting close.

Carnival cruise ship rescues nearly 30 people from adrift vessel

A Carnival Cruise Line ship rescued nearly 30 people who were stuck at sea on Sunday.

The crew on Carnival Paradise saved 28 Cuban nationals who were signaling for help on a vessel that was adrift around 2:30 p.m. The cruise ship was headed from Tampa, Florida, to Roatan in Honduras at the time.

“The bridge team onboard spotted the vessel and turned the ship around to rescue them,” Carnival said in a news release . “All were taken aboard, given food and were seen by the medical team.” The cruise line also notified the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Key West and officials in Roatan.

The Coast Guard did not immediately respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment.

The ship was set to visit Roatan on Monday. Carnival Paradise is on a five-day Caribbean cruise that departed from Tampa on Saturday, according to CruiseMapper .

The news comes after Celebrity Cruises’ Celebrity Apex ship rescued seven people in a small vessel adrift between Cuba and Mexico earlier this month. Another Carnival ship, Carnival Jubilee, also rescued two people stuck in a kayak off the coast of Mexico’s Isla Mujeres in January.

Nathan Diller is a consumer travel reporter for USA TODAY based in Nashville. You can reach him at [email protected].