Regarding the April 27 news article “Study puts people in Americas earlier than was thought”:

This is not the first time an early man site has been publicized. In the 1960s, the Hueyatlaco early man site near Puebla in Mexico, radiodated to 260,000 (plus or minus 60,000) years before present, was studied and reported with much controversy because it went against the archaeologist rank-and-file dogma that only Homo sapiens appeared some 13,000 years before the present in the Americas. In the 1970s, the Calico early man site located in the California Mojave Desert, studied by anthropologist Louis Leakey, was radiodated to 197,000 (plus or minus 20,000) years before the present.

In both earlier studies, only artifactual materials, stone tools, were identified. At Hueyatlaco a diversity of tools from non-local materials was identified; at Calico, there was an abundance of natural materials to make stone tools. After all, stone tool technologies were spread by Homo erectus from Africa to Eurasia around 500,000 years ago and again around 250,000 years ago.

These first two sites during that period were fertile river and lake habitats with abundant game, so it is reasonable to expect that early man (Neanderthals) could have migrated there. Leakey was ridiculed as a heretic for his support of the Calico early man site, and so were the archaeologists who worked on the Hueyatlaco site.

One site can easily be doubted, and two sites make it more plausible, but three sites are not just a coincidence, especially with the third site whose compelling evidence of tools and scarred animal remains is very, very convincing. I suspect that the skeptical rank and file will try to dismiss this extraordinary scientific discovery, too. Is it so hard to accept and believe that early ancient man, Neanderthals, who populated all of Europe and Asia during that period, could have also traveled as nomads on the coastal seas to the Americas?

Thomas Ward, Bethesda