THE NEW WORLD BECOMES INHABITED
At some time toward the end of the last great glaciation—almost certainly after 20,000 years ago—people began to move over Bering Strait, from Asia into America. As you know, the American Indians have been assumed to be basically Mongoloids. New studies of blood group types make this somewhat uncertain, but there is no doubt that the ancestors of the American Indians came from Asia.
The stone-tool traditions of Europe, Africa, the Near and Middle East, and central Siberia, did not move into the New World. With only a very few special or late exceptions, there are no core-bifaces, flakes, or blade tools of the Old World. Such things just haven’t been found here.
This is why I say it’s a shame we don’t know more of the end of the chopper-tool tradition in the Far East. According to Weidenreich, the Mongoloids were in the Far East long before the end of the last glaciation. If the genetics of the blood group types do demand a non-Mongoloid ancestry for the American Indians, who else may have been in the Far East 25,000 years ago? We know a little about the habits for making stone tools which these first people brought with them, and these habits don’t conform with those of the western Old World. We’d better keep our eyes open for whatever happened to the end of the chopper-tool tradition in northern China; already there are hints that it lasted late there. Also we should watch future excavations in eastern Siberia. Perhaps we shall find the chopper-tool tradition spreading up that far.