What I don't understand about your making this argument here is that the article uses "peopled" exclusively to describe what happened 11,500 years ago. It doesn

What I don't understand about your making this argument here is that the article uses "peopled" exclusively to describe what happened 11,500 years ago. It doesn't use it at all to discuss the much later arrival of Europeans. Is your argument that the verb "to people" is so poisoned by its misuse for the arrival of Europeans that it shouldn't be used even to describe those who were genuinely among the first Homo sapiens to arrive in the Americas? (I'm aware that "the Americas" is a contentious term, but I'm following your usage here.)