Clovis people are widely thought to be the first human inhabitants of the Americas, arriving about 13,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. But, as Dr. Rolfe D. Mandel will discuss at the Kansas Wetlands Education Center on Sunday, March 1, geological archaeologists (geoarchaeologists) have found evidence that people not only arrived in North America but spread as far south as Chile long before 11,000 BCE. He will also discuss work that is reconstructing paleoenvironments to determine whether certain settings, such as Cheyenne Bottoms, were favorable for human occupation at the end of the Ice Age. Mandel is the director and state geologist for the Kansas Geological Survey and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas.
