Who exactly where the first people in the Americas and when did they get here?
Initially, they seemed to be the Clovis people from a site in New Mexico, around 13,000 Years Ago (ya, 11,000 BC). That estimate has been consistently knocked back the longer I’ve followed the issue.
Without major confirmation yet, a group in Mexico has found tools from around 33,000 ya, implying that people got to the Americas around 40,000 ya. They haven’t found human DNA. The fun interpretation is aliens or plant people, but if you want to be boring about it, archeology is really hard and getting DNA from 30k+ ya is really, really hard.
What’s particularly interesting is there doesn’t seem to be 1 group of First Americans. There were many groups of first Americans, and they spread, interacted, and probably traded and made war on each other with human consistency.