Coming to America

The Last Ice Age

Our story begins somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 years ago. It's possible at this point that I've lost you already, either because you are surprised by how far back American history goes or because you don't believe the Earth is that old. Today, the best tangible, archaeological evidence we have for humans reaching the Western Hemisphere points to the end of the Last Ice Age. A fundamental assumption of this post and all future posts is that science is real and that science is subject to change as new observable facts become available. So let's continue...

By the end of the last Ice Age, the human race, homo sapiens sapiens, had spread out of Africa, into Europe, across Asia, and sailed out to Australia.

In other words, the Eastern Hemisphere was populated with humans, and the Western Hemisphere was effectively a New World.

For much of human prehistory, the time before written histories were recorded, humans lived as hunter gathers. This means many humans lived largely nomadic lifestyles following herds and looking for new or better sources of food. Edible plants like fruits, wild grains, and tubers would have been important in addition to hunting and fishing. And this nomadic lifestyle is assumed to be the key driving factor for humans spreading out over the known continents.

Assumption: It may also be safe to assume that there is a natural sense of curiosity and exploration that is simply part of the human condition. Otherwise, why build the dug-out canoe and set sail from New Guinea or Indonesia to Australia? It's an incredible risk to simply feed one's family. To assume that ancient humans weren't just as curious as we are today is to discredit our own species. We look to the Moon, to Mars, or to the ocean's depths, as our ancestors looked across the seas to the next island.

Whether hunger or a natural curiosity or both led the first people to cross the Pacific to the Americas is not something we can know for certain, but it does appear that during the Last Ice Age, the sea levels were lower. One theory suggestions that ancient Siberians crossed a land bridge which covered the Bering Strait following herds of animals. This has been the most widely accepted theory of how the first peoples migrated from Asia to the Americas.

The more recent theory suggests that instead of completing the crossing entirely by land, that the crossing like other future voyages to the Americas was done by sea. There are a variety of possibilities here: the first nomads from Asia could have been coastal, canoe-piloting people from the start following marine life along the coast north and around to the Americas, or maybe the journey to Beringia started on land and later took to the sea. Humans are adaptable and clever; if they could canoe their way to Australia, boating to and along the New World is certainly a possibility.

So they made it to the Western Hemisphere...so now what?

There is ample evidence of humans spreading out relatively quickly across both North and South America. Scientists continue to regularly discover new sites, fossils, and tools of America's prehistoric peoples. Arguably the most important and well known are from the Clovis Point culture. In the absence of written language or major cities, prehistoric people can often be identified by unique toolsets. Clovis Points may have been part of a generalized toolkit used to hunt game, spear fish or scrape bones, and these points have been found in over 1,500 sites in North America.

One of the earliest North Americans studied by scientists has been dubbed Kennewick Man or the Ancient One. His remains are some of the oldest remains studied by scientists in the Americas. Kennewick Man appears to be around 9000 years old, and scientists were able to sequence his genome and compare it to modern peoples. Ultimately the study discovered that his closest living relatives are Native North Americans.

It's important to note that these first peoples to cross the Pacific into the Americas did not stay put in North America. Like other ancient humans, they continued to explore. Much like the first people who left Asia for Australia, these people migrated south. The oldest American rock art can be found in Brazil. This and other South American sites indicate that humans arrived in South America somewhere between 9,000 and 12,000 years ago. Other archaeological sites in Chile have scientists and historians questioning the currently constructed timeline altogether suggesting that humans could have been in South America between 18,000 and 15,000 year ago.

Regardless of exactly when Kennewick Man and others, like Anzick Child, or their ancestors arrived in the Americas, evidence at this point suggests that pioneering Siberians seeking better hunting grounds and arguably a better life for their families were the first American immigrants. Their children and grandchildren would spread out across North and South America, developing into distinct societies and cultures, founding great cities, and inventing their own forms of agriculture, religion, and technology independent from their cousins in the Eastern Hemisphere. There is currently little evidence to suggest that when the Last Ice Age came to end that there was still contact between people in the Americas and the peoples of Eurasia.