I understand your intent was to correct crashfrog, but I question the figures. Could you provide a reference?
My reference was an NG article. I found a very similar article
here. My statement was off by a little.
It's only certain that we were in South America 12,000 years ago. That article and
this one from
Home: NOAA Ocean Exploration both seem to lean towards believing we were in South America 30,000 years ago. 60,000 years is mentioned as believed by unnamed somebodies.
I think I was only off with "it's certain we had them there 20,000 years ago."
If someone else wants to discuss it in a new thread, that's great, as I'm interested, but I have now exhausted the extent of my knowledge on the subject. :-)
I don't want to retract my point, though, because I understand 200,000 years is the typically understood time that Homo Sapiens have been in existence and 120,000 or so is a minimum (one of our scientists may want to correct me on that point, but I'm pretty sure I'm not off by too much). It's just a technical point, but it seems worth remembering to me that our "civilized" days are only about 5% of our species' history.