It’s only because of the presence of Europeans from the 15th century onward that we even have terms such as Indians or Native Americans.
How these people came to be is a subject that is complex and fraught, but it begins in the north.
Alaska is separated from Russian land by the Bering Strait. There are islands that punctuate those icy waters, and on a clear day U.S. citizens of Little Diomede can see Russians on Big Diomede, just a little over two miles and one International Date Line away. Between December and June, the water between them freezes solid.
From 30,000 years ago until around 11,000 BC, the earth was subjected to a cold snap that sucked up the sea into glaciers and ice sheets extending from the poles. This period is known as the Last Glacial Maximum, when the reach of the most recent Ice Age was at its fullest.
By drilling mud cores out of the seabed, we can reconstruct a history of the land and the seas, notably by measuring concentrations of oxygen, and looking for pollen, which would have been deposited on dry ground from the flora growing there. We think therefore that sea level was somewhere between 60 and 120 meters lower than today. So it was terra firma all the way from Alaska to Russia, and all the way down south to the Aleutians—a crescent chain of volcanic islands that speckle the north Pacific.
The prevailing theory about how the people of the Americas came to those lands is via that bridge. We refer to it as a land bridge, though given its duration and size, it was simply continuous land, thousands of miles from north to south; it’s only a bridge if we view it in comparison to today’s straits. The area is called Beringia, and the first people across it the Beringians. These were harsh lands, sparse with shrubs and herbs; to the south, there were boreal woodlands, and where the land met the sea, kelp forests and seals.
Though these were still tough terrains, according to archaeological finds Western Beringians were living near the Yana River in Siberia by 30,000 BC.
There’s been plenty of debate over the years as to when exactly people reached the eastern side, and therefore at what point after the seas rose they became isolated as the founding peoples of the Americas. The questions that remain—and there are many—concern whether they came all at once or in dribs and drabs.
Sites in the Yukon that straddle the U.S.-Alaskan border with Canada give us clues, such as the Bluefish Caves, 33 miles southwest of the village of Old Crow.
The latest radio-dating analysis of the remnants of lives in the Bluefish Caves indicates that people were there 24,000 years ago. These founding peoples spread over 12,000 years to every corner of the continents and formed the pool from which all Americans would be drawn until 1492. I will focus on North America here, and what we know so far, what we can know through genetics, and why we don’t know more.
Until Columbus, the Americas were populated by pockets of tribal groups distributed up and down both north and south continents.
There are dozens of individual cultures that have been identified by age, location, and specific technologies—and via newer ways of knowing the past, including genetics and linguistics. Scholars have hypothesized various patterns of migration from Beringia into the Americas.
Over time, it has been suggested that there were multiple waves, or that a certain people with particular technologies spread from north all the way south.
Both ideas have now fallen from grace.
The multiple-waves theory has failed as a model because the linguistic similarities used to show patterns of migration are just not that convincing.
And the second theory fails because of timing. Cultures are often named and known by the technology that they left behind. In New Mexico there is a small town called Clovis, population 37,000. In the 1930s, projectile points resembling spearheads and other hunting paraphernalia were found in an archaeological site nearby, dating from around 13,000 years ago. These were knapped on both sides—bifaced with fluted tips. It had been thought that it was the inventors of these tools who had been the first people to spread up and down the continents.
But there’s evidence of humans living in southern Chile 12,500 years ago without Clovis technology. These people are too far away to show a direct link between them and the Clovis in such a way that indicates the Clovis being the aboriginals of South America.
Today, the emerging theory is that the people up in the Bluefish Caves some 24,000 years ago were the founders, and that they represent a culture that was isolated for thousands of years up in the cold north, incubating a population that would eventually seed everywhere else. This idea has become known as Beringian Standstill. Those founders had split from known populations in Siberian Asia some 40,000 years ago, come across Beringia, and stayed put until around 16,000 years ago.
And the second theory fails because of timing. Cultures are often named and known by the technology that they left behind.
Analysis of the genomes of indigenous people show 15 founding mitochondrial types not found in Asia. This suggests a time when genetic diversification occurred, an incubation lasting maybe 10,000 years. New gene variants spread across the American lands, but not back into Asia, as the waters had cut them off.
Nowadays, we see lower levels of genetic diversity in modern Native Americans—derived from just those original 15—than in the rest of the world.
Again, this supports the idea of a single, small population seeding the continents, and—unlike in Europe or Asia—these people being cut off, with little admixture from new populations for thousands of years, at least until Columbus.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/a-brief-history-of-everyone-who-ever-lived/537942/
How these people came to be is a subject that is complex and fraught, but it begins in the north.
Alaska is separated from Russian land by the Bering Strait. There are islands that punctuate those icy waters, and on a clear day U.S. citizens of Little Diomede can see Russians on Big Diomede, just a little over two miles and one International Date Line away. Between December and June, the water between them freezes solid.
From 30,000 years ago until around 11,000 BC, the earth was subjected to a cold snap that sucked up the sea into glaciers and ice sheets extending from the poles. This period is known as the Last Glacial Maximum, when the reach of the most recent Ice Age was at its fullest.
By drilling mud cores out of the seabed, we can reconstruct a history of the land and the seas, notably by measuring concentrations of oxygen, and looking for pollen, which would have been deposited on dry ground from the flora growing there. We think therefore that sea level was somewhere between 60 and 120 meters lower than today. So it was terra firma all the way from Alaska to Russia, and all the way down south to the Aleutians—a crescent chain of volcanic islands that speckle the north Pacific.
The prevailing theory about how the people of the Americas came to those lands is via that bridge. We refer to it as a land bridge, though given its duration and size, it was simply continuous land, thousands of miles from north to south; it’s only a bridge if we view it in comparison to today’s straits. The area is called Beringia, and the first people across it the Beringians. These were harsh lands, sparse with shrubs and herbs; to the south, there were boreal woodlands, and where the land met the sea, kelp forests and seals.
Though these were still tough terrains, according to archaeological finds Western Beringians were living near the Yana River in Siberia by 30,000 BC.
There’s been plenty of debate over the years as to when exactly people reached the eastern side, and therefore at what point after the seas rose they became isolated as the founding peoples of the Americas. The questions that remain—and there are many—concern whether they came all at once or in dribs and drabs.
Sites in the Yukon that straddle the U.S.-Alaskan border with Canada give us clues, such as the Bluefish Caves, 33 miles southwest of the village of Old Crow.
The latest radio-dating analysis of the remnants of lives in the Bluefish Caves indicates that people were there 24,000 years ago. These founding peoples spread over 12,000 years to every corner of the continents and formed the pool from which all Americans would be drawn until 1492. I will focus on North America here, and what we know so far, what we can know through genetics, and why we don’t know more.
Until Columbus, the Americas were populated by pockets of tribal groups distributed up and down both north and south continents.
There are dozens of individual cultures that have been identified by age, location, and specific technologies—and via newer ways of knowing the past, including genetics and linguistics. Scholars have hypothesized various patterns of migration from Beringia into the Americas.
Over time, it has been suggested that there were multiple waves, or that a certain people with particular technologies spread from north all the way south.
Both ideas have now fallen from grace.
The multiple-waves theory has failed as a model because the linguistic similarities used to show patterns of migration are just not that convincing.
And the second theory fails because of timing. Cultures are often named and known by the technology that they left behind. In New Mexico there is a small town called Clovis, population 37,000. In the 1930s, projectile points resembling spearheads and other hunting paraphernalia were found in an archaeological site nearby, dating from around 13,000 years ago. These were knapped on both sides—bifaced with fluted tips. It had been thought that it was the inventors of these tools who had been the first people to spread up and down the continents.
But there’s evidence of humans living in southern Chile 12,500 years ago without Clovis technology. These people are too far away to show a direct link between them and the Clovis in such a way that indicates the Clovis being the aboriginals of South America.
Today, the emerging theory is that the people up in the Bluefish Caves some 24,000 years ago were the founders, and that they represent a culture that was isolated for thousands of years up in the cold north, incubating a population that would eventually seed everywhere else. This idea has become known as Beringian Standstill. Those founders had split from known populations in Siberian Asia some 40,000 years ago, come across Beringia, and stayed put until around 16,000 years ago.
And the second theory fails because of timing. Cultures are often named and known by the technology that they left behind.
Analysis of the genomes of indigenous people show 15 founding mitochondrial types not found in Asia. This suggests a time when genetic diversification occurred, an incubation lasting maybe 10,000 years. New gene variants spread across the American lands, but not back into Asia, as the waters had cut them off.
Nowadays, we see lower levels of genetic diversity in modern Native Americans—derived from just those original 15—than in the rest of the world.
Again, this supports the idea of a single, small population seeding the continents, and—unlike in Europe or Asia—these people being cut off, with little admixture from new populations for thousands of years, at least until Columbus.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/a-brief-history-of-everyone-who-ever-lived/537942/