About 40,000 years ago they set foot on Alaska and that was the first anyone had seen of the New World, and the first time North America heard the sound of a human voice. “Without doubt, the first Americans arrived as fully developed, modern human beings. They were most definitely not “primordial’ or “primitive,” not stooped and shambling, had no heavily ridged brows. They walked upright and looked much the way American Indians look today. They brought with them an Ice Age patrimony, including basic human skills: fire making, flint-knapping, and effective ways to feed, shelter, and clothe themselves. As early immigrants, they lived in close-knit kin groups, enjoyed social interactions, and shared beliefs about magic and the supernatural. They spoke a fully human language.” The Native Americans – An Illustrated History, edited by Ian and Betty Ballantine, Turner Publishing, Inc., 1993, p.26. Over a period of time the descendants of the first wave of immigrants would by following the migratory herds southward into the temperate latitudes, fanning out over the virgin continent. The First Americans, by the Editors of Life-Time Books, 1992, p7. Some people think that even another emigration came from Europe as well. “The search for Native American origins is a dynamic and continuing process. For centuries, the theories of how man came to inhabit the western hemisphere were varied and sometimes fantastic. One such idea was that early man came from Europe in small boats, following the North Atlantic route later taken by the Vikings.” The Native American Experience, Jay Wertz, Seven Oaks, Carlton Pub. Group, 2010, p8. The theory that North America was peopled from northern Europe as well as from Asia, is becoming more and more credible as time passes. At least a few scientists think that Homo erectus may have even appeared in North America over 40,000 years ago, but most do not. National Geographic Magazine, September, 1979, Search for the First Americans, Thomas Y. Canby, p351. The Paleo-Indians lived as hunters and gatherers in bands of 15 to 50 individuals which were about the correct size to travel far distances seeking food and for mutual cooperation amongst them. Their main weapon was a spear with a sharp, flaked-stone point of flint bound to a wooden shaft. They usually made temporary camps at waterholes or near streams of rivers and lakes, anywhere that the game would come to drink. Once they made their kills and butchered it and then ate the meat they would move on to another site in the vast, cool grasslands. It was “a hunters’ Eden.” “It is possible to visualize the first group of future Americans as they began their trip to the New World, perhaps no more than 30 to 50 of them, camped somewhere on the Siberian tundra near the northern shore of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Where their ancestors came from they do not know; they know only that for uncounted generations their people have been drifting northward, following the wandering herds of mammoth, caribou, horse, bison and other large animals that feed on the tundra’s vegetation. That this tribe lives mainly by hunting seems certain; for the better part of the year there is little other choice. During the short summers, when the barren land bursts forth with blossoms of yellow poppy and saxifrage, they can collect vegetable foods, edible roots and such. There are eggs from the migrating birds that nest on the bay shore by the millions [as still will 35,000 years later] and clams mussels can be gathered along the Siberian beaches band tidal flats. There are also fish and, during spawning season, shoals of leaping salmon. Seals came ashore to breed in their hundreds of thousands and can be clubbed to death. But for some eight months the tundra is frozen and snow-covered: the plants palatable to man are buried and dormant, the birds have flown south, the shellfish beds are locked under the shore ice and the streams are frozen over. For the better part of the year it is hunt or starve.” The Emergence of Man - The First Americans, Robert Claiborne and the Editors of Time-Life Books, 1973, p. 19. Even though life is hard and poor they keep northward learning how to survive. They wear fur trousers and jackets crudely made all year long and in the winter month that add a fur hood. In the summer months there is a 24 hour day so they can spend much of their time in the wide-open. In the fall they construct skin tepees or subterranean huts in live in, snuggling under fur blankets with fires of brush or driftwood. When they had a good fall hunt they could pretty much stay warm in their dwellings, but if it was bad they had to go out into the bitter cold to hunt ptarmigan, arctic hare and fox. Sometimes the hunts were failures and that case people would starve to death. “The tribe’s long drift to the north has proceeded along the relatively narrow strip of Asia between the sea on the right and the mountains, many of which are ice-capped with glacier-filled valleys. Now, turning eastward, they are unknowingly taking their last footsteps in the Old World. Before them stretches Beringa, an expanse of rolling, treeless plains broken by an occasional range of hills and spotted with innumerable small lakes. Nearly all the land is waterlogged; parts consist of a gray-brown morass carpeted with mosses and lichens. But there are also vast tracts of fairly firm land covered with short, hardy, sedges and grasses. Where the grazing is so good, the animals are numerous, and not all would seem unfamiliar to an observer from the 20th Century. Besides such now-vanished species as mammoths and saber-toothed cats, the plains abound with horses and caribou, and on the fringe of the herds lurk wolves, waiting to make their kill. For generation after generation they cross the new land, perhaps 20 generations in all. Following game they arrive on the coast of Alaska in another 10, 20, or 50 generations and eventually the sea swallows of Beringia behind them. They are stuck in the New World. From here they head south to, “the Mackenzie watershed’s corridor between the ice sheets leading to the heartland of North America.” In the 250 generations that followed in the wave or waves of new people the continent was filled up with many Indian cultures. “Among the Indians of North America there are more than 200 identifiable languages, some as markedly different from the others as Chinese is from German – strong evidence that their users followed independent lines of development over long periods of time.” The Emergence of Man - The First Americans, Robert Claiborne and the Editors of Time-Life Books, 1973, p. 21. “Probably the view back through time to the childhood of man can only be seen in distortion. The world becomes a still picture, when it was alive with motion; or it moves when it was as still as eternity. The ice sheets of the “glacial periods” did not come and go as far as men living among them were concerned – they had always been there, the white lands beyond and beyond, and the tumbling cliffs of rotting ice along the edges, snarled with sodden vegetation, they were as permanent as mountains. The mammoths had not “migrated” from Asia with their mastodont ancestors – they had always been there, filling the forests with giant screams; the horses and camels were not migrating from America but had always been there, racing in herds over the rain-swept tundra, and a man’s mother’s mother’s mother could tell how they had always been there in her day. There is no reason whatever to suppose that men of such times were consciously migrating; they were only living, and very likely this valley or that had always been home until eventually some families found themselves spending more time in the valley across the ridge, and that became in turn forever home.” The American Heritage Book of Indians, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. editor, American Heritage/Bonanza Books, 1961/1982, p 13. “And so the people came. They came long before the invention of the bow and arrow, before the domestication of the dog. They had fire, they roasted meat, they worked stone, horn, bone, and probably skins – skeletons of extinct great-horned bison killed some 10,000 years ago are missing the tail bones, indicating the robes were taken. They made beads and used paint taken from red iron oxide, and they drew pictures that are filled with exuberant action. And they were there. Scattered bands of new-made people watching through the interminable dawn of a new-made world, they were on hand when Niagara Falls came into being, and when Crater Lake in Oregon was exploded into existence.” The American Heritage Book of Indians, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. editor, American Heritage/Bonanza Books, 1961/1982, p 14. Time passed in the new land and … “As bands grew too large for a locale to sustain, they subdivided, with new bands hiving off in pursuit of more distant animal herds. By about nine thousand years ago, people could be found from Alaska to the southern-most tip of South America, a distance of some eight thousand miles.” Before long most of the animals over 100 pounds about 2/3 of them became extinct from over hunting and others events. And about this time the grasslands were taken over by more forests. Different types of plants and smaller animals came with the expanding forestlands. “The natives had to learn their local environments more intimately to harvest shellfish, fish, birds, nuts, seeds, berries, and tubers. The Indians obtained more of their diet from fishing as they developed nets, traps, and bone hooks. Their hunting evolved into patient and prolonged tracking of more elusive mammals, especially deer, pronghorn antelope, moose, elk, and caribou.” American Colonies – The Settling of America, Alan Taylor, Penquin Books, 2001, pp.6-10.
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 06:36:37 +0000
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