Horizon
Season 39 Episode 15 - Stone Age Columbus
Who were the first people in North America? From where did they come? How did they arrive? The prehistory of the Americas has been widely studied. Over 70 years a consensus became so established that dissenters felt uneasy challenging it. Yet in 2001, genetics, anthropology and a few shards of flint combined to overturn the accepted facts and to push back one of the greatest technological changes that the Americas have ever seen by over five millennia. The accepted version of the first Americans starts with a flint spearhead unearthed at Clovis, New Mexico, in 1933. Dated by the mammoth skeleton it lay beside to 11,500 years ago, it was distinctive because it had two faces, where flakes had been knapped away from a core flint. The find sparked a wave of similar reports, all dating from around the same period. There seemed to be nothing human before Clovis. Whoever those incomers were around 9,500BC, they appeared to have had a clean start. And the Clovis point was their icon - across 48 states.
Episodes in Season 39
Helike - The Real Atlantis
60 min
Volcano Hell
60 min
Fatbusters
60 min
The Lost Pyramids of Caral
60 min
Death of the Iceman
60 min
Parallel Universes
60 min
The Dinosaur that Fooled the World
60 min
The Fall of the World Trade Center
50 min
Archimedes' Secret
60 min
The Mystery of the Jurassic
60 min
Killer Lakes
60 min
The A6 Murder
60 min
The England Patient
60 min
Freak Wave
60 min
Stone Age Columbus
60 min
Homeopathy: The Test
60 min
The Day the Earth Nearly Died
60 min
The Secret of El Dorado
60 min
