Who discovered America? And when?
In one of my earlier incarnations, I very much wanted to study the origins of homo sapiens on Earth. I was extremely interested in archaeology, with an emphasis on paleo archaeology and anthropology. My heroes were people like the Leakey family, Donald Johanson (discover of the hominid known as "Lucy"), and Leakey proteges like Diane Fosse and Jane Goodall. At some point, I shifted my emphasis to the paleo history of the Americas and read everything I could find about it. At the time I first became interested, the conventional wisdom was - and, in fact, for a long time continued to be - that humans first set foot on these continents via a bridge from Asia that existed across the Bering Straits around 13,000 to 11,000 years ago. They were designated as the Clovis people based on distinctive spearheads that were found among mammoth bones near Clovis, New Mexico. Those spearheads were found in the 1930s and the theory that arose from them held sway in the archeological community...