Peopling North America

This land bridge was over 600 miles wide was present for thousands of years and that there was life here as it had its own flora and fauna. While the Bering Land Bridge Theory does not directly challenge Traditional Native American history, the Beringia Standstill Theory does. This theory implies that the Native Americans ancestors were not originally from North America. The idea is that the Native American’s ancestors originally were from Northeast Siberia. The Siberian people lived there for tens of thousands of years before the ice age, but after the ice age took effect the Siberian people began to abandon the region some going south towards the mainland while others went north away from the mainland. The split occurred roughly 23,000 years ago and the Siberia people who went North away from the mainland settled on the Bering Land Bridge. Because this land bridge known as Beringia had flora and fauna the living conditions here were suitable for settlement and so these people did so for over 5,000 years. Approximately 18,000 years ago, the Bering land Bridge began to melt and is believed to have completely melted away about 12,000 years ago. With the end of the ice age near the inhabitants of Beringia were forced to migrate as massive flooding began

The peopling of the Americas “was the last great human migration, the final leg of our journey out of Africa” (Bawaya, M. How the west was won). Precisely how and when this migration occurred is presently up for debate. Accepted archaeological wisdom stated by Hetherington “suggests that the first Americans were large game hunters who migrated from northeast Asia across the Beringian land bridge ca. 12000 years BP, spreading southward through a continental ice-free corridor” (R. Hetherington et al.). Gugliotta says that archaeologists called these pioneers the Clovis, after distinctive stone tools that were found at sites near Clovis, New Mexico, in 1929 (Gugliotta, The first Americans).

"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.

About 225 million years ago, according to the theory of “Pangaea,” the world was once a single supercontinent that contained all the dry land. Approximately 10 million years ago, North America was shaped by the majestic Canadian Shield. About 2 million years ago, in North America, the grand glaciers laid the land of Canada and the United States, southbound as far as from Pennsylvania all the way to the Pacific Northwest. Recently, about 135 million to 25 million years ago, four massive ranges—the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and the Coast Ranges, arose in western North America. About 35000 years ago, the ancestors of the Native Americans, the nomadic Asian hunters, first

The migration of European settlers and culture to North America is an often examined area. One aspect of this, however, is worthy of deeper analysis. The conquest of North America by Europeans and American settlers from the 16th to 19th centuries had a profound effect on the indigenous political landscape by defining a new relationship dynamic between natives and settlers, by upsetting existing native political, economic and military structures, and by establishing a paradigm where the indigenous peoples felt they had to resist the European and American incursions. The engaging and brilliant works of Andres Rensendez and Steve Inskeep, entitled respectively “A Land So Strange” and “Jacksonland”, provide excellent insights and aide to this analysis.

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:

These people that we broadly categorize as Native Americans descended from a small band of men and women who had crossed the Bering Strait land bridge between Alaska and Siberia about 12,000 years ago. The bridge closed about a thousand years after their arrival, effectively barring anyone else from joining them. As a result, they effectively closed themselves out from the rest of the world for thousands of years. This gave them the chance to thoroughly “explore the entire continent” and learn how to properly cultivate the land around them, and also grow their population to 10s of millions (Resendez 139).

originally came over to North America via the Bering Strait at a time when the

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.

One often wonders where the Native North Americans originated from. Some theories have been discussed about the peopling of the Americas. Early theories involving lost tribes and continents were based purely on speculation instead of actual scientific facts. Discoveries made during many archeological expeditions have helped shape the always changing interpretations by adding more questions and more theories. There have been genetic and linguistic studies which raised more understanding and brought new questions.

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

In this day in age, technology and a wide variety of innovations have given us a vivid peek at history, propelled us farther into our understanding of our evolutionary past, and enabled us fill in the gaps and blanks with approximate dates and explanation that are missing within history, such as, in this case, how humans managed to settle in America. By initially analyzing the DNA of the findings, the researchers have obtained and provided us with a better understanding of early human civilizations. Whether or not humans were stuck within the Beringia due the environmental blockade of glaciers, these findings could ultimately lead up to a thorough and concrete conclusion regarding early humans’ migration and expansion in the Americas. It would definitely not be a surprise if researchers discovered more ancient remains that hint the early settlement of humans in the Americas within the Beringia region that is currently below sea-level and uncovered more interesting possibilities regarding our evolutionary history in the near

In the first part of this article it explains how dogma has trumped science. Through the couse of this first section it explains the idea of the Bering Strait theory. This is a highly controversal theory that states that Paleoindians walked from Asia over an anciant land bridge about 15,000 years ago. To many people this theory is rock solid but to some it is an insult. There are some breaks in the theory, one being that there is a gap in time that is unaccounted for. Some say that they settled into the land bridge then once again moved, but this is not for certian. There was even a term coined for die-hard archaeologists who insist upon Clovis as representing the earliest culture of North America. They were called the "Clovis Police". The

As mentioned above, the Clovis culture once marked the appearance of the first American population. Dating back ~13 KYA, the Clovis record was described as a “migrating culture” (Dillehay, 2009). However, the report of activity before the Clovis record (Dillehay, 2009) caused its abandonment as the first population in the Americas ~13 KYA. In terms of estimations of time based on genome analysis, specifically through mtDNA, results are not specific, ranging from 30-15 KYA. (Raff and O’Rourke, 2010). This is because date comparisons of genetic markings, estimated mutation rates and other methods used by genetic researchers in the process of dating DNA differ from one another (Raff and O’Rourke, 2010). Nonetheless, these contributions