Archaeological research by the UO's Jon Erlandson on the Channel Islands off California and Dennis Jenkins at the Paisley Caves in Oregon has landed in National Geographic magazine.

The story "Tracking the First Americans" provides readers with a rundown of new discoveries and the various theories in the quest to understand just who the first Americans were. It appears, the article says, that a growing number of discoveries have opened fresh debate.

Some 30 years of work by Erlandson, executive director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History, points to settlement by seafaring travelers who pre-date the early inhabitants known as the Clovis people.

Inland, in a series of caves near the town of Paisley in south central Oregon, Jenkins has found evidence from DNA in human coprolites and from stemmed projectiles of a culture that also pre-dates Clovis.