Early American History Paper ( First American's )

Traditional Native American history tells that Native Americans have always inhabited the North American Continent since the beginning of time, but this is open for debate. Many historic scientists have believed in what is known as The Bering Land Bridge Theory, which is a theory that been widely accepted since the early 20th century. The idea of this theory

Before the Spanish ship that changed it all, which arrived in the “New World” in 1492, there was a vast population of native people who had lived on this land for centuries prior. That ship, skippered by Christopher Columbus, raised arguably one of the most influential turning points in Native American and European history. It sparked the fire of cultural diffusion in the New World which profoundly impacted the Native American peoples and the European settlers.

According to the standard accepted theory, the Clovis people were the first inhabitants of the Americas. The Clovis people crossed the Beringia land bridge during the period of the last ice age, from there they spread across the Americas through an ice free-corridor. However, recent finding have suggested that the first people did not walk to America but came by boat. This paper will examine evidence found in Haida Gwaii and other sites along North and South America that supports a different view of human migration to the Americas, the coastal migration theory.

These nomads continued moving all the way to South America. By the time Europeans arrived in America, there were already at least forty to fifty million indigenous people inhabiting the land (Faber 4-5). Other explorers, from Norway, Greenland, and Iceland reached America centuries before Columbus (Faber ix). Although these people attempted to live in this new land, they didn’t stay long, and failed to create a lasting historical impact (Faber 20-26).

"The Colonization of North America." In Modern History Sourcebook. April 1999- [cited 17 September 2002] Available from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall.mod/modsbook.html., http://curry.eduschool.virginia.edu.

From the mid 1500’s to the 1700’s, people from all over Europe flocked to the vast lands of North America. Spain and England quickly became the most dominant European presences in the Americas. Citizens of the two countries had very different experiences in the New World. This was partially due to their different interactions with Native Americans, religions and their different motivations for coming to the New World. Although rivals at the time, Spain and England’s colonization efforts shared many similarities.

* According to anthropologists, where did the first human beings live? Why did they leave that place? How did they get to North America?

During the sixteenth century European pilgrims migrated across the Atlantic Ocean to settle in North America. North America had just been introduced to the Western Civilization. The America’s were home to the indigenous people, that were made up of several tribes that were called Indians by the early settlers. Together the Indians and settlers began to thrive. Growth and development in the new world was made possible by the abundant amount of natural resources.

How the first Native people arrived has always been shrouded with mystery, yet there have been theorists to suggest they came in one way or another. “Heavily glaciated during the Pleistocene epoch (Ice Age), the early prehistory of Canada mirrors the withdrawal of the Ice” (Lightfoot 2009: 249). The Laurentide sheet and the smaller Cordilleran ice sheet had created floors of the Chukchi and the Bering Sea, creating a bridge between Asia and Alaska. This bridge has been presumed to be the route in which our long ago ancestors first entered the New World. It was then though Beringa, humans then begun to create settlements all over

1) The book, 1491, by Charles C. Mann gives readers a deeper insight into the Americas before the age of Columbus, explaining the development and significance of the peoples who came before us. Moreover, Mann’s thesis is such; the civilizations and tribes that developed the Americas prior to the discovery by Europeans arrived much earlier than first presumed, were far greater in number, and were vastly more sophisticated than we had earlier believed. For instance, Mann writes, regarding the loss of Native American culture:

In an attempt to answer these questions, Horwitz embarks on a voyage. As he retraces the footsteps of the early European explorers and settlers, he was surprised to disclose how much history Americans have forgotten, bowdlerized, and commercialized. In Part II of Horwitz’s book, he focuses on the European explorers as they travelled through the Gulf Coast, the Southwest, the South, and the Mississippi regions of the United States. I found Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca’s personal story quite interesting, “Between 1528 and 1536, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca took a cross-country trek that made Lewis and Clark’s expedition, three centuries later, look like a Cub Scout outing by comparison.” He, like many of the other early European explorers, ventured to the New World in search of gold and glory. His efforts proved to be unsuccessful, as numerous obstacles stood in his way. Threats for survival, including the warm climate, the landscape, and shortage of food greatly

It has been thought for many years that the Americas were a vastly unpopulated land until Columbus came. However new evidence disputes this previously thought notion. Archeologist, who have been studying the remains of Native American culture, have found evidence suggesting that the Indians were in the Americas for much longer and in greater numbers than what was believed. This new evidence shows us the impact the Europeans had on the New World and gives us insight into what the Americas were like before the Europeans and what they may have been had the Europeans never settled here.

Indians arrived in America some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. Archeological findings and Radiocarbon testing suggested that the prehistoric people who populated the Americas were hunters following the herds of wooly mammoths. They walked from Siberia across a land bridge into Alaska. They headed south toward warmer climates, slaughtering the mammoths as they went. As the glaciers melted, the oceans rose and covered this land bridge, creating the present-day Bering Strait and separating Alaska from Russia. By the time Christopher Columbus arrived, they were millions of what might be called First Americans or Amerindians occupying the two continents of Americas. The first noted documentation of the Beringia theory of the peopling of North America was by Jose de

The first Americans (pg 7): Migrants from Asia crossed the wide lands connecting to Siberia and Alaska and thus became the first Americans they gather and hunted value resources that

In modern America, we often take for granted the natural world that surrounds us and the American culture which is built upon it. For many of us, we give little thought to the food sources that sustain and natural habitats that surround us because when viewed for what they are, most people assume that they have “simply existed” since the country was founded. However, the documentary ‘America Before Columbus’ provided this writer an extremely interesting record of how the America we know came to exist. In the documentary, one of the most interesting discussions centered on the fact that it was not merely the arrival of conquistadors and colonists that irrevocably changed the landscape of the Americas, but that it was also the coined term known as the “Columbian Exchange” that afforded these travelers the ability to proliferate so successfully. The basic definition of the Columbian exchange is one that defines the importation of European flora and fauna. It could also loosely represent other imports, both intended and unintended, such as tools, implements, and even disease. Armed with this definition, it takes little imagination to envision how differently the Americas might have developed had any significant amount of the native European flora, fauna, or other unintended import not been conveyed to the Americas through the Columbian Exchange. Beyond the arrival of explorers, settlers, and colonists to the New World, the breadth of what the Columbian Exchange represented to