America Before: How Deep Does the Story Go?

The story of human civilization in the Americas, as told for most of the twentieth century, went like this: roughly 13,000 years ago, a group of big-game hunters crossed a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, walked south through an ice-free corridor between two continental glaciers, and spread rapidly across two virgin continents. These were the Clovis people, named after the distinctive fluted spear points first found near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1930s. Before them, the Americas were empty. End of story.

That story is dead. It has been killed by evidence — slowly at first, then all at once. Graham Hancock’s 2019 book America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization arrived at a moment when the old timeline was already crumbling, and he used the opportunity to ask the question that the new evidence demands: if humans were in the Americas far earlier than we thought, doing far more sophisticated things than we imagined, what else have we missed?

The Clovis Barrier Falls

The Clovis-first model was not just a theory. It was an orthodoxy, enforced with the kind of ferocity that academics reserve for ideas they have built their careers on. For decades, any archaeologist who presented evidence of pre-Clovis human habitation in the Americas faced professional marginalization. Sites were dismissed. Dates were challenged. Careers were damaged.

Tom Dillehay experienced this firsthand. In 1977, he began excavating Monte Verde, a site in southern Chile, near Puerto Montt. What he found should not have existed: a well-preserved settlement with wooden structures, stone tools, and preserved plant materials, buried in an anaerobic peat bog that prevented decomposition. The site included twelve distinct residential structures, hearths, wooden mortars, and digging sticks. Radiocarbon dating placed the main occupation level — Monte Verde II — at approximately 14,500 calibrated years before present, a full 1,000 to 1,500 years older than any Clovis site.

It took twenty years for Monte Verde to be accepted. In 1997, a panel of leading archaeologists visited the site and confirmed Dillehay’s findings. Even then, resistance continued. The implications were uncomfortable: if people were in southern Chile 14,500 years ago, they must have entered the Americas much earlier, because Chile is about as far from the Bering land bridge as you can get. The tidy narrative of a single migration through an ice-free corridor could not accommodate people at the bottom of South America before the corridor was even open.

Then came the Bluefish Caves in the Yukon, with cut-marked bones dating to approximately 24,000 years ago. Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, with occupation layers dating to at least 16,000 years ago. Pedra Furada in Brazil, with controversial but persistent dates reaching back 32,000 years or more.

And then came White Sands.

The White Sands Revolution

In 2021, a team led by Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University and researchers from the U.S. National Park Service published a paper in Science announcing the discovery of human footprints at White Sands, New Mexico, preserved in ancient lake sediments. The prints were found in seven distinct soil layers associated with the shores of ancient Lake Otero, showing clear anatomical detail — heel impressions, medial longitudinal arches, toe pads. They belonged to adults, teenagers, and children. Some showed adults walking alongside children, holding hands.

The initial radiocarbon dates, based on seeds of the aquatic plant Ruppia cirrhosa found in the sediment layers, placed the footprints between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. Critics immediately challenged the dating, arguing that aquatic plants can absorb older carbon from groundwater, artificially inflating the age.

The response was definitive. In 2023, a team led by Jeffrey Pigati of the U.S. Geological Survey returned to the site and dated ancient lakebed mud — not plant material — using two independent laboratories. Both labs reported the same range: 20,700 to 22,400 years ago. A 2025 study provided an expanded estimate of greater than 23,600 to 17,000 calibrated years before present.

Humans were walking along a lakeshore in what is now New Mexico at least 21,000 years ago — during the Last Glacial Maximum, when massive ice sheets covered most of North America. They were there at least 8,000 years before Clovis. The ice-free corridor was sealed shut. The land bridge was passable, but getting south of the ice was another matter entirely. How did they get there?

The coastal migration route — boat people moving south along the Pacific coast, island-hopping and following kelp forests — is now the leading model. But 23,000 years is deep time. It pushes back not just the date of arrival but the entire question of what these early Americans were doing for all those millennia before Clovis points appear in the record.

The Serpent Mound

In Adams County, Ohio, a serpent undulates across a plateau above Brush Creek. It stretches 1,348 feet (411 meters) from its coiled tail to its open jaws, which appear to be swallowing an oval shape — interpreted variously as an egg, the sun, or the world. It is the largest serpentine effigy mound on Earth, and it is built on the rim of a crypto-explosion structure — a circular geological formation caused by either a meteorite impact or a volcanic gas explosion approximately 300 million years ago.

The dating of the Serpent Mound is genuinely contested. Based on nearby Adena culture burial mounds, it was long attributed to the Adena period (roughly 800 BCE to 100 CE). But radiocarbon dating from a 1991 excavation suggested an age of approximately 900 years, placing construction in the Fort Ancient culture (1000-1500 CE). Then in 2014, new radiocarbon dates pushed the age back to around 300 BCE, supporting Adena construction again.

Hancock is drawn to the Serpent Mound not for its precise age but for its astronomical alignments and its deeper resonance. In 1987, Clark and Marjorie Hardman published their finding that the serpent’s head aligns with the summer solstice sunset. Other researchers have argued that the body’s curves align to solstice and equinox sunrise positions, or to key positions in the 18.6-year lunar cycle. The serpent is an astronomical instrument, built on an impact crater, encoding celestial knowledge in an effigy of the creature that, across world mythologies, represents the guardian of esoteric wisdom.

The Amazon’s Hidden Civilization

Perhaps the most revelatory section of America Before concerns the Amazon — long dismissed as an impenetrable green desert incapable of supporting complex civilization. That dismissal was always more assumption than evidence, and LIDAR technology has demolished it.

Beginning in the early 2000s, researchers began documenting hundreds of geometric earthworks in the Brazilian state of Acre, in the southwestern Amazon. These geoglyphs — circles, squares, hexagons, rectangles, and interlocking shapes — were carved into the earth with ditches up to 11 meters wide and 4 meters deep. Their diameters range from 100 to 350 meters. More than 450 have been documented in Acre alone, spread across approximately 13,000 square kilometers.

But the Acre geoglyphs were just the beginning. In 2018, a study published in Nature Communications used LIDAR to survey 5,315 square kilometers of the southern Amazon basin and identified more than 900 earthworks, including previously unknown sites. The researchers estimated that between 10,000 and 24,000 pre-Columbian earthworks may still be hidden beneath the forest canopy across the broader region.

What sustained these populations? Terra preta — Amazonian Dark Earth. This uniquely fertile black soil, rich in charcoal, bone, pottery fragments, and organic matter, is found in patches throughout the Amazon basin, covering an estimated 10 percent of the Amazon’s area. It is not natural. It was made by human hands over centuries or millennia, using a sophisticated technique of mixing charcoal, organic waste, and low-temperature fire into the naturally infertile tropical soil. The result is a self-renewing soil system that remains fertile for thousands of years. Modern soil scientists are still trying to fully replicate the process.

The geometric earthworks of the Amazon bear a striking resemblance to the earthworks of the Ohio Valley — the Serpent Mound, the Newark Earthworks, the great geometric enclosures of the Hopewell culture. Hancock draws attention to this parallel: widely separated cultures, with no known contact, building similar geometric and astronomical earthworks encoding similar mathematical relationships. Coincidence, or common inheritance?

The Solutrean Hypothesis

America Before also engages with one of the most controversial ideas in American archaeology: the Solutrean hypothesis. Proposed by Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution and Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter, this model suggests that during the Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 21,000 years ago, Stone Age peoples from southwestern Europe — the Solutrean culture of what is now France and Spain — crossed the North Atlantic by following the edge of the pack ice and colonized the eastern seaboard of North America, their tool-making techniques eventually evolving into Clovis technology.

The evidence cited by Stanford and Bradley centers on technological similarities between Solutrean and Clovis stone tools, particularly the technique of “overshot” or “outrepasse” flaking — a method of thinning a stone biface by striking a flake that travels all the way across the surface. This technique appears in both Solutrean and Clovis assemblages but is rare in the Siberian and Beringian tool traditions through which mainstream models route the first Americans.

The Solutrean hypothesis has been widely criticized. Genetic studies of the Clovis-associated Anzick-1 burial, dating to approximately 12,600 years ago, show strong DNA affinities with Siberian populations, not European. There is no evidence of Solutrean seafaring capability. A 6,000-year temporal gap separates the latest Solutrean sites (around 17,000 BCE) from the earliest Clovis sites (around 13,500 years ago). And the shared flaking technique may represent convergent technology rather than cultural transmission.

Hancock presents the Solutrean hypothesis not as established fact but as one of several lines of inquiry suggesting that the peopling of the Americas was far more complex than a single migration from Siberia. Whether Europeans crossed the Atlantic 21,000 years ago or not, the evidence now makes clear that multiple populations, following multiple routes, arrived at multiple times far earlier than the Clovis-first model allowed.

The Depth of the American Story

The cumulative effect of the evidence Hancock assembles in America Before is disorienting in the best sense. Humans in the Americas 23,000 years ago. Sophisticated geometric earthworks in the Amazon and Ohio. Self-renewing engineered soils that outperform modern agriculture. Astronomical alignments encoded in serpentine effigy mounds built on ancient impact craters. A continent that was not empty before Columbus, not empty before Clovis, and not empty before the Last Glacial Maximum.

The standard historical narrative gives the Americas roughly 500 years of “real” history (since European contact) and grudgingly extends this to perhaps 13,000 years (Clovis). The actual story now stretches back at least 23,000 years — and possibly much further, if the more controversial dates from sites like Pedra Furada and the Cerutti Mastodon site (which yielded broken bones and stone tools dated to an astonishing 130,000 years ago) hold up under scrutiny.

Hancock’s question is not whether mainstream archaeology has been entirely wrong. It is whether its framework has been too narrow to accommodate what the land itself is trying to tell us. The Americas are not the New World. They may be among the oldest continuously inhabited landscapes on Earth. And the civilizations that flourished here before European contact were not primitive precursors to “real” civilization. They were expressions of deep knowledge, long memory, and sophisticated relationship with the land that we are only now beginning to recognize.

What if the Americas hold the key not just to the missing chapters of human history, but to an entirely different understanding of what civilization can be?