Americas Populated Only Recently - LexiLine Journal 329

The highly acclaimed Edge Foundation
http://www.edge.org/
has 120 prominent minds commenting on John Brockman's question:
WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?

At Law Pundit (http://www.lawpundit.com) I have been, inter alia, commenting on these comments by 120 prominent minds: The most recent is the belief that the Americas were populated only recently http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/diamond.html
a belief voiced by JARED DIAMOND, Professor, biologist and geographer at UCLA and author
of a superbly interesting book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670033375

Diamond believes that:

"[H]umans first reached the continents of North America, South America, and Australia only very recently, at or near the end of the last Ice Age."

and that

"Every year, discoveries of many purportedly older sites are announced, then to be forgotten. As the supporting evidence dissolves or remains disputed, we're now in a steady state of new claims and vanishing old claims, like a hydra constantly sprouting new heads."

The reason, says Diamond, is:

"It makes better newspaper headlines to report "Wow!! New discovery overturns the established paradigm of American archaeology!!" than to report, "Ho hum, yet another reportedly paradigm-overturning discovery fails to hold up."

Take a look at his entire statement, which is well worth reading.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/diamond.html