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The 30,000 year old evidence in Brazil isn't very good. There are some broken rocks in a rock shelter that people are calling "tools," but the breakage patters on them suggest to me that they were more likely broken by random tumbling.

But with that aside, there is very good evidence from multiple sites (Paisely Caves, Friedkin, Meadowcroft, Cactus Hill, Monte Verde, the list goes on) of people living in the Americas at least 15,000-16,000 years ago. This habitation occurred before the corridor through the Canadian ice sheets was passable. People pretty much had to get to the Americas by boat. The most likely scenario is island hopping from the coast of Siberia to the coast of Alaska and down along Canada's coast. There is also a very small number of archaeologists looking at the possibility of an additional migration that followed the sea ice across the Atlantic from Paleolithic Europe, but most archaeologists are not fans of this idea.

Of course, we don't know exactly what kinds of boats they used back then, but there was a good article written about hunter-gatherer boat technology by Margaret Jodry in the book Paleoamerican Origins: Beyond Clovis. If you have access to this book, her chapter can give you a pretty good idea of what kinds of boat technology would likely have been available to Paleolithic peoples.

It's actually a ceratopsid reimagined with a human head. When ceratopsid fossils were found in ancient times, with their beaks and four legs and long tails they were imagined as a cross between a lion and an eagle with the frill being the remnants of wings. Mammoth skulls with their central opening were thought to be Cyclops. Huge bones the remains of giants. Iguanodon might have been the first fossil recognized for what it was but hardly the first dinosaur fossil ever found.

Cyclops Myth Spurred by 'One-Eyed' Fossils?

The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times

>From Scientific American The history of paleontology, as it is usually seen, starts with the work of French naturalist Georges Cuvier some 200 years ago. Mayor, a classical folklorist, moves the date back to the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans. "The ancients collected, measured, displayed, and pondered the bones of extinct beasts," she writes, "and they recorded their discoveries and imaginative interpretations of the fossil remains in numerous writings that survive today." Among the beasts whose bones they pondered were giant giraffes, mammoths and mastodons. Mayor also proposes that the griffin of classical folklore, described in the legends as having the body of a lion and the beak of an eagle, "was based on illiterate nomads' observations of dinosaur skeletons in the deserts of Central Asia." And she tells of purely imaginary creatures of the classical period, such as the triton and the centaur. But her focus is on what the ancients made of the bones of real animals. Advances in classical studies and paleontology, she says, "now make it possible to restore the ancient fossil investigations to their rightful place in the history of science."

Ancient Greek vase where the monster seems to have the fossilized head of a dinosaur
>Adrienne Mayor is a palaeontologist and is kind of the first person who popularised the connection between mythology and fossils. So in places such as northern Africa, people would describe gryphons, which guarded gold in caves, as having the body of a mammal but the beak of a bird. And in this area they found the skeletons of Protoceratops: dinosaurs with bodies that look like a mammal and with a beak. Actually, these people weren’t making these things up: they were finding these fossils and explaining them in their own way.


>Folklorist and historian of science Adrienne Mayor of Stanford University has suggested that the exquisitely preserved fossil skeletons of Protoceratops and other beaked dinosaurs, found by ancient Scythian nomads who mined gold in the Tian Shan and Altai Mountains of Central Asia, may have been at the root of the image of the mythical creature known as the griffin. Griffins were described as lion-sized quadrupeds with large claws and a raptor-bird-like beak; they laid their eggs in nests on the ground.

>Greek writers began describing the griffin around 675 B.C., at the same time the Greeks first made contact with Scythian nomads. Griffins were described as guarding the gold deposits in the arid hills and red sandstone formations of the wilderness. The region of Mongolia and China where many Protoceratops fossils are found is rich in gold runoff from the neighboring mountains, lending some credence to the theory that these fossils were the basis of griffin myths.

>In 2016 this hypothesis was contested, as it ignores pre-Greek gryphon art and accounts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoceratops#Origin_of_griffin_myths

Myths of Griffin and sphinx are very old. But fossils are even older.

Fagan's Ancient Lives is the Archaeology 101 textbook at Arizona State University, where I am completing my degree. I greatly enjoyed it.
https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Lives-Introduction-Archaeology-Prehistory/dp/1138188794/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=K9JJFHA5QDMBQ0KFZRKK

Any updates on if he really was a Roman intelligence agent or not?

How about the first one in the series, The Last Kingdom. Be warned, though, there is a lot of graphic violence—which almost goes without saying given the time period, but it might take a bit of getting used to.