For decades it has been believed that the first peoples to populate North and South America crossed over from Siberia by way of the Bering Strait on a land-ice bridge.

However, a new study examining the largest collection of South American skulls ever assembled suggests that a different population may have crossed the bridge to the New World 3,000 years before those Siberians.

People with skulls resembling Paleo-Indians were present in Asia around 20,000 years ago, and lacking the technology to cross the Pacific Ocean by boat, they probably crossed the land bridge to Alaska several thousand years before the Siberians, said study co-author Mark Hubbe of the Universidade de So Paulo.

"We don't know for sure, but we believe at least 3,000 years earlier," Hubbe told LiveScience. "We have a difference of 3,000 years in South America, and we can assume the difference is the same in North America."

--

This is being presented to the Journal of the National Acadamy of Sciences. I do not call it science however. My first skepticism is in the part 'they probably crossed the land bridge...' which is based entirely on the belief that people lacked the technology to cross an ocean 10,000 years ago. Throw a big tree into the water and it will cross the ocean. People 10,000 years ago couldn't sit on a floating log? It was too advanced for their primitive brains? Really?

My next issue is pretty plain, in the last paragraph. "We can assume...". Right. That's not science. admittedly I'm one of a small handful of people who have found the evidence to be overwhelming that cultures had come and gone in the western hemisphere long before the great Asian migration of the last ice age. There was humanoid acitivity all over the western slopes of the Andes - long before the Bering crossing. Bolivia, Peru, Chile.  During this time, huge megalithic stone structures appeared all over the planet, including these places.  Most 'scientists' refuse to acknowledge this body of evidence, clinging to beliefs and assumptions about what technologies humans had available prior to written history. We simply don't know.

But I am excited by the fact that we have yet more overwhelming evidence to consider once we get some real scientists to put all the pieces together and tell us what really happened.