Rewriting over the last couple of days has been centered around the earliest date and most likely route for the First People’s arrival in Texas. I’ve looked into the Beringian Corridor through the ice when the two glaciers began to pull apart and found that archeologists are struggling to find evidence for a date early enough to explain earlier, solid dates below Beringia. (by the way, Beringia was more than a land bridge, it was a continent the size of Texas). The earliest date of artifacts in the corridor is 14,200 years ago. So I considered the alternative hypotheses for early arrival. There is a good one that has moved from marginal to wide acceptance by archeologists and geneticists – The Kelp Highway. This explanation points out that the ancient Beringians that were holding up in South Beringia, on the Pacific Coast during the harsh Last Glacial Maximum, where they learned the ways of coastal existence, developing a taste for kelp. Traveling south (around 17,000 years ago) from the corridor would have stalled people migrating through different ecosystems, while the Pacific Coast offered the same environment all the way to Tera del Fuego. At any time the people could have followed a river into the interior and where they might decide to follow the herds they found. I rechecked the date of the earliest habitation at Gault (near Austin) by emailing some of the principle diggers and this morning I find that there were people there at 16,500 years ago. And there are other early American sites, like Meadowcroft, Pennsylvania at 16, 000 years ago. These very early people used a dart point (a five-foot shaft launched by a spear-thrower) called the Western Stemmed that pre-dates the Clovis, and guess what? The Gault authorities won’t identify the pre-Clovis as Western Stemmed, but they do say that they resemble each other. So, if there were people living a little south of us – they must also have frequented the Bosque River, that was much, much larger then.