What Is Early Human Migration?

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.

speak with a certain eloquence. They tell of a people adept at building, artistic, in

The Incas and the Aztecs Before the Spanish and Portuguese "discovered" the New World, there

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

The first Europeans arrived in North America in the fifteenth century CE. Native cultures included the Olmec, the Maya, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mound Builders of the Mississippi region, and the Anasazi of the American Southwest. The first metropolis in Mesoamerica, was the city of Teotihuacan, capital of an early state about thirty miles northeast of Mexico City that arose around the third century B.C.E. and flourished for nearly a millennium until it collapsed under mysterious circumstances. Among the groups moving into the Valley of Mexico after the fall of Teotihuacan were the Mexica. Folk legend held that their original homeland was the island in the lake called Aztlan, from that is why today they are known as the Aztecs. The Aztecs were excellent warriors. They set out to bring the entire region under their domination. For the remainder of the fifteenth century, the Aztecs took control over much of which is known as modern Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and as far south as the Guatemalan border. The Chimor kingdom was eventually succeeded in the late fifteenth century by an invading force from the mountains far to the south. The Inka were a small community in the area of Cuzco, a city located at an altitude of ten thousand feet in the mountains of southern Peru. In the 1440s, under the leadership of their powerful ruler Pachakuti, the Inka launched a campaign of conquest that eventually brought the entire region under their authority. Under his

The Mayas: Developed approximately two thousand years ago. On the Yucatan Peninsula, in today’s eastern Mexico, the Mayas built urban centers containing tall pyramids and temples. They studied astronomy and created and

The ancient Mayan civilization settled in the Yucatan Peninsula in around 900 AD. This civilizations was one of the most advanced of its times. They created their own religion, language, mathematical structure, a very precise calendar, and many other things.

As mentioned by Calloway in the beginning of the “Documents” section, it is important to consider that historians often disregard stories due to their lack of understanding and that these stories can provide insight into the lives of individuals who lived through certain times in history. As pointed out by Leslie Marmon Silko, origin stories should not be taken as fact. I think that viewpoint supports the idea of possible migrations.

The major consensus is that first Americans came across an ice bridge from Siberia. This is prominent in their facial features that share similarities of the natives of Siberia. The first people could make it as far as Africa until the ice bridge opened up about 14,000 years ago. Prior, the ice sheets stopped any travel. When the sheets did open up, they spread in a time frame of several years, along with their stone work, known as Clovis points. The people, named after these points spread down North America, hunting mammoths and other now extinct

Settling on a mesa top allows invaders to easily attack. Instead, the Pueblo people settled on the side of a cliff, enclosed by a low stone wall. This makes it harder to attack and easier to defend. I think this is my strongest evidence because

For years, it had been widely accepted “that small bands of humans carrying a generalized Upper Paleolithic tool kit entered the Americas around 11,500 radiocarbon years before the present” (Waters 1122); and that “Archaeologists called these presumed pioneers the Clovis culture, after distinctive stone tools that were found at sites near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s” (Curry 13). However, the “peopling” of the Americas and their presumptive date of arrival is a topic of great debate within the field of Archeology; and the discovery of the Paisley Caves in south-central Oregon has thrown a wrench in the once widely accepted hypothesis that the “Clovis complex is considered to be the oldest unequivocal evidence of humans in the

Archaeology provides clues to the past when no written record existed, making the field the only way to expand the existing knowledge of the Clovis and pre-Clovis cultures. In South America, there is an abundance of archaeological sites dating to both Clovis and pre-Clovis times, but in North America, specifically on the East coast, there are only a handful of excavated sites. In reference to pre-Clovis, this statement is especially true, with varied sites that have not been fully excavated or are not convincing enough to be considered hard hitting evidence in favor of their existence. These sites are the basis for the debate over who came first and if pre-Clovis really existed or not, making the analysis of excavations a key factor to understanding

. the first humans to come to America came by land, the ice age caused the sea level to drop, revealing a land bridge that connected North America and Eurasia

The most widely accepted and proponent is The Land Bridge Theory. It is also as the Bering Strait Theory and is a popular model of migration into the New World. This theory was first proposed in 1590 by José de Acosta and has been widely accepted since the 1930’s. The Land Bridge Theory proposes that people migrated from Siberia to Alaska across a land bridge that spanned the current day Bering Strait. The migrators were named the Clovis people because they were name after spearheads were found in the 1930’s in Clovis, New Mexico.

Along the banks of North American East Coast lived an ancient civilization called the Anilorac Clan. This Anilorac clan is believed to have been occupying their land for thousands of years. Fossils from ancient burial grounds were carbon dated back to around the 1700. But there is talk among other archeologist that they could have been here longer. It is unknown where this culture came from, but they are believed to have come from the European area.