Indigenous peoples of the Americas: Encyclopedia II - Indigenous peoples of the Americas - Early history

Indigenous peoples of the Americas - Early history

See also: Archeology of the Americas, Models of migration to the New World

Indigenous peoples of the Americas - The Bering Strait Land Bridge Theory

Based on anthropological and genetic evidence, scientists generally agree that most indigenous peoples of the Americas descend from people who migrated from Siberia across the Bering Strait, between 17,000–11,000 years ago.

The exact epoch and route is still a matter of controversy, as is whether it happened at all. Until recently there was a consensus among anthropologists that the alleged migrants crossed the strait 12,000 years ago via the Bering Land Bridge which existed during the last ice age (which occurred 26,000 to 11,000 years ago), and that they followed an inland route through Alaska and Canada that had just been freed of its ice cover. There are a number of difficulties in this theory — in particular, growing evidence of human presence in Brazil and Chile 11,500 years ago or earlier [1]. Thus other possibilities, not necessarily exclusive, have been suggested:

• The migrants may have crossed the land bridge several millennia earlier and followed a coastal route, thus avoiding the ice-covered interior.
• They may have been seafaring people who moved along the coast, a theory disputed due to the relative lack of seafaring skills of peoples of this time period, but supported strongly with anecdotal evidence of sea migration to Australia at least 60,000 years ago over more than 250 kilometers of open ocean at that time period.
• The crossing of the Bering Land Bridge may have occurred during the previous ice age, around 37,000 years ago. This is also supported by the archaeology dating of some sites in South America prior to the previously assumed date of 12–14,000 years ago.

Indigenous peoples of the Americas - The Pre-Siberian Aborigines Theory

A more radical theory holds that a population of Pre-Siberian American Aborigines already occupied the Americas before the Siberian migrations. These earlier inhabitants could be migrants from Oceania, who arrived either by sailing across the Pacific Ocean or by following the land route through Beringia at a much earlier date.

Proponents of this theory claim that the oldest human remains in South America and in Baja California show distinctive non-Siberian traits, resembling those of Australian Aborigines or the so-called "negrito" peoples of South and Southeast Asia, such as the Andamanese of the Andaman Islands. These hypothetical Pre-Siberian aborigines would have been displaced by the Siberian migrants, and may have been ancestral to the distinctive Pericu indians of Baja California, and of the Fuegians, the indigenous peoples of the Tierra del Fuego.

Indigenous peoples of the Americas - Migration waves

In spite of the lingering controversy about who were the first Americans, anthropologists and archaeologists generally agree that most of the indigenous peoples who lived in the New World right before the European conquest descended from Siberian hunters, who entered North America about ten millennia ago, and then gradually spread to Central and South America.

Several genetic surveys have indicated clear affinities between present-day indigenous American populations and peoples of Siberia. According to Ilya Zakharov of Moscow's Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, the Northern Native Americans are related to the Tuvans, a Turkic group of people located in the Tuva Republic at the southwestern edge of Siberia. The general consensus of such studies is that at least three separate migrations from Siberia to the Americas are highly likely to have occurred:

• The first wave came into a land populated by the large mammals of the late Pleistocene, including mammoths, horses, giant sloths, and woolly rhinoceroses. The Clovis culture would be a manifestation of that migration, and the Folsom culture, based on the hunting of bison, would have developed from it. This wave eventually spread over the entire hemisphere, as far south as Tierra del Fuego.
• The second migration brought the ancestors of the Na-Dene peoples. They lived in Alaska and western Canada, but some migrated as far south as the Pacific Northwestern U.S. and the American Southwest, and would be ancestral to the Dene, Apaches and Navajos.
• The third wave brought the ancestors of the Eskimos and the Aleuts. They may have come by sea over the Bering Strait, after the land bridge had disappeared.
• In recent years, molecular genetics studies have suggested as many as four distinct migrations from Asia. These studies also provide surprising evidence of smaller-scale, contemporaneous migrations from Europe, possibly by peoples who had adopted a lifestyle resembling that of Inuits and Yupiks during the last ice age.

One result of these successive waves of migration is that large groups of peoples with similar languages and perhaps physical characteristics as well, moved into various geographic areas of North, and then Central and South America. While these peoples have traditionally remained primarily loyal to their individual tribes, ethnologists have variously sought to group the myriad of tribes into larger entities which reflect common geographic origins, linguistic similarities, and life styles. (See Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas.)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Early history", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki