Comment on “Redefining the Age of Clovis: Implications for the Peopling of the Americas”

of some Clovis sites but have not definitively established the temporal span of this cultural complex in the Americas. Only a continuing program of radiometric dating and careful stratigraphic correlations can address the lingering ambiguity about the emergence and spread of Clovis culture. Opinions differ about whether Clovisprojectile points mark a rapid dispersalof the first humans throughout the Americas or merely an infilling of the land after earlier migrations. Waters and Stafford (1) provided very precise 14C dates for some sites of the Clovis cultural complex and for some “non-Clovis ” sites, leading them to assert that the revised age range for Clovis is both brief and overlapping with some non-Clovis sites. They argued that this overlap proves the presence of pre-Clovis populations in the Americas, across which Clovis technology spread. However, the data presented are not directly relevant to thi