Where Did The First Americans Come From



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Where Did The First Americans Come From?

The question of how, when, and why humans first entered the Americas is of intense interest to archaeologists and anthropologists, and has been a subject of heated debate for centuries. Several models for the Paleo-Indian settlement of America have been proposed by various academic communities.

The Land Bridge theory, also known as the Bering Strait Theory or Beringia theory, has been widely accepted since the 1930s. This theory of migration into the New World proposes that, at some point during the last Ice Age/glacial period (about 17,000 years ago), as the ice sheets moved and sea levels fell, people first migrated from Siberia into Alaska. These nomadic hunters were following big game animal herds, like mammoths and bison. They were able to cross between the two continents by a land bridge called the Bering Land Bridge, which is today the Bering Strait. This is because, about 17,000 years ago, ocean levels were 60 meters (200 ft) lower than today, which exposed a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. This land bridge was at least 1,000 miles wide. Historians believe that some of the nomadic hunters continued their movement southward and settled in parts of North and South America.

A significant problem with the land bridge theory arose in 1997, however, when a panel of authorities inspected the Monte Verde site in Chile. They concluded that the evidence predates sites in the North America Midwest by at least 1,000 years. At the Topper archaeological site, located along the banks of the Savannah River in South Carolina, human artifacts were determined to be as old as 50,000 years before the present. This would indicate the presence of humans well before the last glacial period. Other discoveries in 2002 and 2003 also pose a problem for the land bridge theory: fossilized feces as well as hunting tools found in Oregon indicate the presence of humans in North America as much as 1,200 years prior to the Clovis culture (the group of people believed to be the first in the Americas).

Another theory of settlement is the Pacific Coastal Model. Pacific models propose that people first reached the Americas via water travel, following coastlines from northeast Asia into the Americas. Coastlines are unusually productive environments because they provide humans with access to a diverse assortment of plants and animals from both terrestrial (land) and marine (water) ecosystems. The Pacific “coastal migration theory” helps explain how early colonists reached areas extremely distant from the Bering Strait region, including sites such as Monte Verde in southern Chile. Many excavations have uncovered evidence that subsistence patterns of early Americans included foods such as turtles, shellfish, and tubers (underground part of a stem or root). This is a change of diet from the big game mammoths, bison, horse, and camels which early Clovis hunters apparently followed into the New World.

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