The first human arrivals in the New World may have sailed from northeast Asia

The first people to migrate to North America may have sailed from north-east Asia around 20,000 years ago. Experts have argued that prehistoric people in Hokkaido, Japan, used similar stone tools to those later found in North America, and suggest that seafarers may have travelled to the continent during the last ice age, bringing this stone technology with them. This adds weight to the theory that the first Americans arrived much earlier than previously thought.

And:

“By [around 30,000 years ago], Upper Palaeolithic seafarers were using sea-going vessels to access some of the outer islands in the Japanese archipelago … and were capable of negotiating the Kuroshio Current, one of the fastest in the world,” Davis and his colleagues write in their paper, published in October in the journal Science Advances. “This suggests that such experienced seafarers may also have been capable of handling adverse Pacific coastal currents.”

Nonetheless, the team also suggest that the journey could have happened at a much slower pace. In this reconstruction, the prehistoric seafarers gradually followed a route along the Pacific coast.

Here is the full story.  I have long wondered why, every now and then, in Japan I see a person who looks a great deal like a “Native American.”