Re: 40,000 year old New Worlders?

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article296886.ece

 accessed 7-6-05

http://news.yahoo.com/s/cpress/20050705/ca_pr_on_sc/britain_mexico_footprints

accessed 7-7-05

For David, definitely Melanesians. And you are correct that even this is a bit later than the date for the Mexican footprints. 

    "At the Matenkupkum cave on New Ireland, Chris Gosden's
excavations have shown that occupation begins at 33,000 B.P.
while Panakiwuk and Balof caves on the same island have dates of
15,000 B.P. and 14,000 B.P. respectively.  New Ireland lies some
600 km to the northeast of the Huon peninsula, which yielded
dates for its waisted axes of 40,000 B.P.  It would have been
possible to reach New Britain and New Ireland by hopping between
visible islands.  However, in order to reach Buka in the
Solomons, the next chain of islands, an open-sea crossing of 170
km is needed and the destination is not visible from New Ireland.
 A date of 28,740 B.P. from the Kilu rock shelter on Buka Island,
recently obtained by Stephen Wickler and Matthew Spriggs, shows
that occupation was achieved 25,000 years earlier than previously
though."
     "Such early colonization was not, however, confined to Melanesia.
 Farther north the Ryukyu chain of islands was likewise never
joined at times of low sea level to either the Japanese
archipelago or the continental shelf in the East China Sea. 
Consequently, the find of a human skeleton at Yamaschita-Cho cave
on Okinawa dated to 32,100 B.P. must be added to the evidence
from Sahul and the Bismarks as the earliest evidence for sea
crossings by boat." ~ Clive Gamble, Timewalkers, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 228

In searching through my data base I did find a linguistic reference which says that the time it would take for Amerind languages to evolve to the state they were observed in when Europeans arrived is about 33,000 years.