Maritime Traditions and Why We Remember Columbus

As a child in grade school, I was taught "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue" to prove the world was round, and he discovered America, to continue to recite this myth is to discount other maritime traditions and to discredit the intelligence of educated Europeans of the time...

While Gavin Menzie's book 1421 has been widely discredited, it did shed some light on forgotten maritime history. Western Europeans weren't the only ones with ocean-worthy vessels. So I'll start tonight recognizing other oceanic voyages which certainly merit our respect and can help contextualize European voyages.


One of the greatest maritime cultures can be found in the Pacific. The islands of the Pacific were populated by Polynesian voyagers. These explorers settled Hawaii before the Norse made their way to Canada. Making the Polynesians the first people in United States after the Native Americans. The Polynesians sailed vast expanses of the Pacific on outrigger canoes, and ongoing research appears to suggest that the Polynesians may have had contact with the Native American peoples of South America, bringing the Sweet Potato back to the islands one thousand years ago.

There is also solid evidence that the Norse established a colony in Canada 400 years before Columbus set sail. The Norse ventured all over the world, raiding most of Europe, while colonizing Iceland and Greenland. Their ships had a shallow draft and were able to sail both the ocean and the rivers. It does not appear that the Norse made their way to the current United States and ultimately their colony in Canada appears to have been abandoned.


Meanwhile in the 15th Century, the Chinese constructed ocean-going ships like the world had not seen. Admiral Zheng He commanded the mighty treasure fleet of Chinese junks which sailed around Indonesia, India and Eastern Africa. While widely discredited, Menzie's book 1421 suggests the Chinese sailed around the world. Evidence does not support this claim, but their vessels and endeavors are certainly impressive and worthy of further study. The Chinese junks were cruising around the Indian Ocean while Arab dhows were also used to visit Africa and India. My point being that by the time of Columbus' voyages, humanity was traversing the oceans in a variety of different kinds of vessels.

The other maritime tradition I will visit is that of the European fisherman. There is archaeological evidence of Basque fisherman visiting Canada just after Columbus' voyages, and some quick internet searches will reveal that there's at least some discussion that some of these fishermen may have sailed before Columbus. Again, my point being that Columbus is part of a bigger maritime happening, and circling back to the idea that humans are by their nature curious and looking for the next horizon.


So at this point, it can be safely stated that the Norse reached the Americas before Columbus and likely that the Polynesians did as well (and if they didn't, they certainly reached Hawaii which is part of the United States before Columbus). And it can be asserted the Columbus' voyage is part of bigger movement of peoples taking to the ocean.


Columbus, an Italian navigator, is part of a European movement to sail the seas. Prince Henry the Navigator established a school for navigators and cartographers in the early 15th Century, and Europeans begin setting sail along the African Coast. In 1487, Bartolomeu Dias sets sail, eventually rounding Africa and reaching India. He returned to Portugal in 1488.


To be clear, Dias' patrons didn't worry about him sailing off the edge of the world. Educated Europeans were aware the world was round. The model of the universe supported by the Roman Catholic Church and ancient Greek studies held that the Earth and planets were perfect spheres with the Earth at the center of the universe. The model is at play in Dante's Paradiso, the final part of the Divine Comedy written in the 1300's. This model of the universe would later be challenged by Copernicus and Galileo. Using Ptolemy's model of the Earth, the big question of the day was not 'if the world was round' but rather 'how far around'. Dias' voyage demonstrated that India could be reached from Western Europe, but was there a shorter route? That was purpose of Columbus' voyage.


Believing the world was smaller around than it is, Columbus set sail westward to find a faster route to India. But why were Europeans so keen on getting to India?

Western Europeans had established the Crusader States as colonies during the Middle Ages and enjoyed lucrative and beneficial trade for goods like spices and silks across the Mediterranean. The Crusader States were eventually reclaimed by the people of the Middle East, and eventually the Ottoman Turks conquer the Middle East and the remnants of the Eastern Roman Empire, taking Constantinople in 1453 CE. Without their colonies in the Middle East, Europeans use the Mongol controlled Silk Road to reach Asia and continue trade, but overland trade is slow, difficult, and risky. By the 15th Century, the Mongol Khanates which kept the silk road going were gone, and this pathway falls into disuse. There is economic competition amongst European nations to establish trading relationships, and oceanic travel could both provide advantage and be the great equalizer.


Columbus sets sail in 1492, less than 20 years after the start of the Spanish Inquisition. His bravery should not be questioned, this first voyage was an incredible risk. Columbus reaches the Americas thinking he is near India. On October 11th, Columbus makes land and meets the Taino, people already living in the Caribbean. He writes, "It appears to me, that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of opinion that they would very readily become Christians." By day two, Columbus is looking to make a deal, saying I "strove to learn if they had any gold. Seeing some of them with little bits of this metal hanging at their noses." By the 14th of October, he has taken 7 people as slaves to be brought back to the Queen of Spain and claims he could conquer the whole island with 50 men. Columbus and his crew bring with them: religion, disease, firearms, and a belief that their European culture is superior to the Taino. The Spanish claim these populated islands in the name of Spain. Columbus completes 4 voyages to the Americas and never steps foot in the United States.


Columbus' ultimate legacy isn't that he proved the world was round. He didn't find India either. His voyages did popularize European exploration, looking for a western (later Northwest) passage to Asia. After his voyages, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English sailors explore the Americas, map it, and colonize it. The Spanish return the Americas claiming territory from South America to the American Southwest and Florida. They bring Catholicism, which spreads via Missions; they bring horses and firearms, and they bring diseases unknown to the Americas which spread as epidemics amongst the enslaved Taino. In a matter of 50 years, the Taino civilization is largely wiped out, and Europeans diseases start to spread to other native peoples who had contact with the Taino. Ultimately Columbus is the first in a series of Europeans who enslave and kill native peoples in the name of their home country, monarch, and/or church. It's the root of the later idea of Manifest Destiny.


So if he didn't prove the world was round, and he didn't step foot in the United States, and he wasn't the first European to reach the New World, why do we celebrate Columbus Day? Oddly enough the answer has it's roots in white supremacy, but maybe not in the way you would think. In the late 19th Century, Italian immigrants were not welcomed by white American society; they were the migrant of the day to hate. In New Orleans, in 1891, 11 Italian-Americans were lynched. Columbus, while he sailed for Spain was Italian, and the following year (1892), President Harrison declared Columbus Day as a holiday to honor the victims.

European Crisis and the Quest to Reclaim Roman Glory

At this point we've established that Americas first peoples migrated to the Western Hemisphere during the Last Ice Age; they spread out over the continents establishing different cultures, cities, cultivated a variety food crops, and told their stories through art...

These nations made war, brokered peace, while some rose, and some fell. Some are well know, and some we may never know. For nearly 15,000 years these tribes or nations or countries developed into complex agricultural societies that spanned from Eastern forests to Southwestern deserts to the Andes in South America to the frozen coastline of Alaska.


Across the ocean, in 27 BCE Caesar Augustus becomes arguably the first true emperor of Rome. After grappling with Julius Caesar and ultimately assassinating him, the Senate of the Roman Republic loses significant power under Augustus putting Senators at odds with whoever the emperor is for most of Roman history. The Romans conquer most of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, building roads, bathes, arenas, civic building, monuments, and walls as they go.


For a few centuries, the Romans hold the line against migrating Germanic tribes. Rome falls in the 5th Century, and Goths, Franks, Saxons, and others spread out into Western Europe. And most of European history afterwards chases after the glory of Rome.


Imagine that it's the year 600 CE, you are a Frankish villager carrying your goods to market. You pass a Roman aqueduct on your way with it's arches flying high into the sky, and you realize that you, your people, and your kingdom have no ability to build that. It's a sort of inferiority complex living in Rome's shadow, but the kingdoms of Europe try hard to rebuild Rome.

• In the 6th Century, Justinian manages to retake parts of the old Roman Empire in the name of the Constantinople.
• In late 8th Century and early 9th Century, Charlemagne conquers much of Western Europe and is crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III.
• A host of kings and emperors wage war across Europe from Charles V to Napoleon to Hitler. Various rulers have tried to rule all of Europe.
• In Eastern Europe the tsar's derived their title from the word caesar.
• In government buildings and museums from Washington DC to London to Paris to Berlin inspiration is taken from Roman architecture 

After the fall of Rome, Europe spends a lot of time in crisis. The Moors conquer modern day Spain, leaving the Franks feeling pressure to the west. Waves of migration and raids from the Norse and the Magyars affect how the nations of Europe develop. Places like Northern France end up being fought over time and again because the feudal system of government and conquest leaves William Duke of Normandy, also King of England. France and England would be at war from Henry V to Joan of Arc in the Hundred Years War.


The one unifying force in Western Europe through most of the Middle Ages was the Roman Catholic Church. The church has a fascinating impact on Europe. Monasteries are where Latin literature and ideas survive. The church provides the inspiration for the construction of churches and cathedrals and the rebuilding of an artisan class. The church is also the unifying force which brought Europe together to massacre the peoples of the Middle East during the Crusades.


The Crusades are Western Europe's first attempt at colonization. The Crusader States are established on the coast of the Mediterranean. The cost in lives of Jews, Muslims, and even Eastern Christians as a result of Crusades may never be known, but we do know that Western Europe benefited in at least two ways: 1) the establishment of trade for goods like silk and spice across the Mediterraneans and 2) rediscovering Greek writing which had been preserved in the Caliphates of the Middle East.


The Latin and Greek works are studied in the universities which spring up around cathedrals. Cities of artisans and traders form around these churches too. It creates a new social class that is not peasant, not clergy, not noble. A little more educated, a little more wealthy, a class that can bring about the Renaissance. The Renaissance is arguably the closest Europeans felt to the Romans since the fall of Rome. Works of art like Michelangelo's David have a distinctly Greco-Roman feel, and that's entirely intentional.


That's not to say that as Europe exited the Middle Ages that it wasn't still a continent in crisis. Increased trade leads to waves of plague as stowaway rodents are off loaded with goods. And eventually around 1000 years after the original fall of Rome, Constantinople the last Eastern Roman city falls to the Ottoman Turks. Much like the Franks once felt pressure from the Moors to the West, Vienna feels the pressure of the Ottomans to the East.


And just for fun, the institution which had been a unifying force for Europe, the Roman Catholic Church, is about to be rocked by the Protestant Reformation. Europeans are about to adventure beyond the Mediterranean during a time of religious turbulence.

Wampum Belts and the Haudenosaunee Confederation

Americas first peoples arrived at the end of the last Ice Age, eventually cultivated a wide variety of food crops which we still enjoy today, and built some impressive cities which you can still visit today...

It's important to keep in mind that America's first peoples were in fact peoples. While previous posts have noted common themes like cities planned out along celestial lines or the importance of maize as a staple food; the Native Americans were divided into distinct nations. Previously, we explored parts of the Southwest and Midwest, so tonight we'll turn out attention eastward.


A previous post touched on food as a part of culture, but artistry and craftsmanship shouldn't go ignored. The Wampum Belt is an exquisite example of fine craftsmanship, attention to detail, making use of available resources, and the ability of art to convey a message. Not long ago, I watched a show where this art form was being passed on to a younger generation, I believe using glass beads, but the original beads had been made of shells. What's most interesting about the belt isn't the skill of turning shells into beads or even weaving them together, it's the care and attention that is spent on conveying a message. The belts aren't just a piece of art; they are a record like a Medieval tapestry or the plaid patterns of the Celts. Important stories and messages are written into these belts.


Perhaps the most famous of these Wampum Belts is the Hiawatha Belt. This belt symbolizes the union of the five tribes who became the Haudenosaunee (aka Iroquois) Confederation. There's an oral history of the Great Peacemaker bringing the 5 tribes together to form the Confederation which you can enjoy by clicking here.


The people of the Confederation shared a common language, and lived in modern day New York and Pennsylvania. From reading various articles and interpretations of the oral history; it's hard to pin down an exact date for the forming of the Haudenosaunee Confederation. The range appears to be from after 1100 AD to before 1500 AD which is the kind of gap history textbooks aren't typically comfortable with. The Haudenosaunee lived in wooden long houses, and the population estimates vary between 5,000 and 20,000 people in the nation. Note this is a big difference when compared to the more urban societies of Cahokia or Teotihaucan, which had as many people in a single city.


According to the oral history, the Great Peacemaker traveled with Hiawatha, leader of the Onondaga people, and Jigonhsasee, a woman known for counseling warriors. After a period of wars between the Onondaga, Seneca, Mohawk, Cayugas, and Oneida; the leaders are brought together to broker peace. Each group is able to maintain their own leadership structure but these leaders also meet as a council to decide on common causes. It should be noted that part of the law under which the Haudenosaunee Confederation operated share commonalities with our US Constitution. In the 18th Century as the colonies tried to chart a way forward in unison, they looked to the Haudenosaunee Confederation as an example of cooperation to follow.


Today, we still rely on symbolic or artistic representation to understand and communicate about past events. The 50 stars on the US flag represent a union of 50 states; in the same way the 5 tribes are represented on the Hiawatha Belt. But what you may not realize is that the bundle of arrows held in the bald eagle's talon under the banner reading "E Pluribus Unum" was a metaphor shared by a Haudenosaunee chief, Canassatego. Our culture and history today are influenced by the Americas original inhabitants even if that history has gone unnoticed in the past. I write this post knowing that I've brought us eastward for a reason, future posts will start looking at interactions of Europeans and the people already living on America's Atlantic coast.

Your Favorite Foods are Probably American in Origin

Modern cuisine benefits greatly from food crops originating in the Americas

Do you enjoy German chocolate? What about going out for Italian, there's nothing like pasta with tomato sauce? Enjoy bangers and mash? And of course Thai food often leverages peanuts? And in November, we sit down to a large meal of turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberries, pumpkin pie, and corn.

The majority of the foods listed above have in part their origins in Native American agriculture. Here's a short list for you to take in (warning you might become hungry as you review): Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Tomatoes, Squash, Pumpkin, Corn, Avocado, Green Beans, Cacao, Peanuts, Peppers, and Cranberries.

Corn was arguably the most important crop of the Americas, it was grown and eaten not only by city-dwelling Native Americans like the Cahokians, but corn or maize was a staple crop across the Americas from Mexico to the American Southwest to the Midwest. It was domesticated from a wild grain around 9,000 years ago. Corn is still a major crop in the United States today, from popcorn, to high fructose corn syrup, to animal feed; the United States exports over a billion bushels of corn.

Many of these food crops in the Americas became incredibly valuable when grown in Europe. The potato supported the Incan Empire and later became the staple crop of Ireland. Tomatoes got their wild start in or near Peru as well, but appears to have been cultivated further north near the Yucatan. The tomato like the potato made its way to Europe, and oddly enough made it's way back across the ocean such that most of our garden varieties are ancestors of European breeds of tomato.

Today it's hard to imagine Italian cuisine without the tomato or Irish or German cuisine without the potato. In the Americas a wide variety of produce was being grown without the benefit of horses or oxen to pull plows.  Native peoples innovated new ways to grow crops to minimize depleting the soil; Three Sisters Planting combines growing corn, with beans, and pumpkin or squash together. Legumes like beans or peanuts put nitrogen back into the soil; it's the same reason farms in the Midwest rotate corn and soy today. The Three Sisters method provides other benefits, the corn acts as a pole or terrace for the beans to climb, and the leaves of the pumpkin or squash plants help keep the soil cool to retain water.

I've saved dessert for last. Cacao is a seed or nut which can be made into chocolate or cocoa. In the ancient Americas, it was turned into a drink. While the plant grew in South America, as it does today,  like today it was enjoyed elsewhere. In my last post, I touched on trade between ancient American cities, and cacao was no exception. Artifacts from Cahokia indicate that Cahokians were enjoying the same Cacao beverage enjoyed by their South American neighbors.

In short, the food crops of the Americas are not only delicious but they continue to impact our daily lives and economies around the world. Food is certainly a part of culture, and while we don't often reflect on the origins of our food, maybe the next time you sit down for a meal, you'll think about how America's first peoples cultivated it thousands of years before your meal.

From Nomads to City Life

Americas first peoples spread out across North and South America at the end of the Last Ice Age...

And unfortunately we don't know quite as much about these people as we'd like. It's the tricky thing with hunter-gatherers; they certainly leave clues behind: flint tools, arrow or spear heads, fossils, and petroglyphs (rock art), but a nomadic lifestyle does not lend itself to being materialistic, so they don't have quite as much stuff to leave behind. The information from the time of their first arrival to the development of better understood cultures like the Maya, Olmec, Aztec, Anasazi, or Mississippians is patchy.

The oldest known petroglyphs in the United States can be found in the southwest, in Nevada, dating back between 11,000 and 15,000 years ago. Agriculture in the Americas may date back to around 10,000 years ago with earliest domesticated plants coming from the squash family.

The history of agriculture has been typically intertwined with the development of the city, almost like the age old question of the chicken and the egg. One might say that people developed agriculture, then had a steady food source, and this allowed them to settle down and build cities; OR people found a place to successfully hunt, a place worth defending, built the city and then needed to support it with agriculture. Ultimately the truth may lie somewhere between these two theories. There's no reason to believe that people wouldn't have settled near places with plentiful hunting and wild grains. Evidence in Turkey seems to suggest that hunter gathers were capable of banding together to build Gobekli Tepe. The construction of this temple may turn the preconceived notion about the need for agriculture, urbanization, and specialization to build monuments on its head. It isn't an accident that that Americas first peoples settled in places where food crops like wild rice grew naturally. Evidence in the Americas suggests that people eventually settled where food was abundant and likely developed certain agricultural practices before building cities.

One of the oldest known cities in the Americas can be found in Guatemala. The Mayan city of Kaminaljuyu appears to date back to around 800 BCE. To give you some sense of the timeline, this is around the same time as the Phoenician civilization founded the City of Carthage. Like other urban sites, Kaminaljuyu is filled with the assortment of artifacts one would expect at a major dig site: specialized tools, workshops, pottery, agricultural products, and refuse. The development of agriculture and cities is really quite the amazing thing. The city restructures a society in incredibly important ways. It is in cities where you find an increase in job and skill specialization. This allows for focused development on further specializing tools. It encourages the development of social constructs: farm laborers vs artisans vs a priestly caste or ruling elite. Cities give rise to the development of mathematics and writing because working people need to know how much their work is worth and laws are put in place to maintain order.

One of the oldest cities in the Americas which best represents this development of specialization is Teotihuacan in Mexico. This is a well known, often visited UNESCO World Heritage Site adorned with large stone pyramids. The city dates back to the first century CE and at one point was home to an estimated 25,000 citizens. Simply feeding a population of 25,000 would have required a significant labor force of farmers, but in order to create the infrastructure found in the city, the city needed engineers, artisans, and probably some less skilled workers for mining the stone and moving it. And of course the development of the city also means, you have those who live in the city and those who live outside of it which is a different kind of social stratification.

So arguably I've diverged some from a history of the United States. Why focus in on the cultures developing near the Yucatan? Cahokia is why. American History textbooks often dive into the Aztecs and the Incas as a precursor for talking about Spanish exploration. My intention here is simply to use the earliest cities in the Americas as an example of how cities develop. Cahokia formed significantly later than Kaminaljuyu or Teotihuacan; the city was built near St. Louis MO on the Illinois-side of the great Mississippi River around 800 CE. Again for reference, to orient yourself on Earth's timeline, this is around 350 years after the Fall of Rome and around the time of Charlemagne's rule. Cahokia is built around a series of mounds of various heights. These mounds are highly reflective of the pyramids built at Teotihuacan; it's a comparable urban design. It has been speculated and evidence seems to support that the design of these cities is lined up as a greater celestial calendar. And this shouldn't be a surprise. Cahokia is home to wood henges, very much like the more famous Stonehenge. For an agricultural society, knowing when spring was coming, when to plant crops, when to harvest, these are the most important things, and they can be known by understanding the Sun and stars in the sky. Mississippian culture spread out from Cahokia and evidence of it can be found in Aztalan, WI as well as the Natchez in Mississippi. Between 1100 AD and 1200 AD, Cahokia erects palisade walls and eventually the city declines. The creation of fortifications suggests there was someone worth keeping out. That's one of the great challenges faced by many great cities, how do you interact with the folks outside of the city? The current theory about the fall of Cahokia points a collapse in agricultural (corn) production driven by climate change, and as food became more scarce, the social order collapsed, sometimes violently. Before the Spanish fleet ever set sail, Cahokian civilization had collapsed. Today you can visit Cahokia in IL; it's a pretty fantastic site, and if you are otherwise in the Midwest, there are other mound sites for you to visit such as Aztalan in WI.

A post on the development of cities in the Americas would be remiss if it did not touch on the American Southwest. The Anasazi people, the ancestors of today's Pueblo peoples (the Hopi and Zuni) also took to constructing cities. There's a distinctly southwestern feel to the clay brick structures built up along cliffs overlooking the desert. These cities look like formidable fortifications and certainly give the appearance of being defendable. What's somewhat odd is that these people don't appear to have started off living in the cliffs. Anasazi culture appears to have developed around 1500 BC. Chaco Canyon is preserved as a national park today and was home to people for nearly 10,000 years. Between 800 and 1200 CE, massive stone Great Houses were built at Chaco, possibly felling 200,000 trees to complete the construction. The buildings in Chaco like the structures in Cahokia and Teotihaucan are oriented with celestial bodies. A system of roads connected the people of Chaco, and there is evidence that this civilization was trading with other peoples like the Cahokians. Trade amongst cities should not be surprising, as noted earlier, specialization develops within cities, such that if your city is really great at making pottery, the next city over might produce a food product you really want, then these cities become interconnected via trade. Oddly enough at around the same time as the decline of Cahokia, the Anasazi appear to retreat from Chaco Canyon and move up into the fortified cliffs. During the 12th century, Chaco Canyon also experiences forces of climate change becoming drier, and it had been potentially deforested in the efforts to build the Great Houses. There is also evidence of violence being a part of the collapse with fossil remains which appear to have been butchered and boiled. If the land in Chaco Canyon was no longer able to support sustained agriculture and violence erupted, this may explain why people split off into smaller groups, building impressively fortified cities hidden upon the cliffs.

While neither of the high societies of Chaco or Cahokia were in place to meet the European explorers in the 15th of 16th Centuries, their descendants would encounter the Europeans with consequences no less disastrous than the fall of these civilizations. (That's a post for another day) There are also lessons to be learned today in understanding how these cities rose to power and fell. Cities, even today, are dependent on a steady source of food, on agriculture. It must be grown in sufficient quantity to be brought in and sustain the city's population. Food scarcity is a fast track to social disorder. And agricultural production can be threatened by climate change. Perhaps this is the most important lesson for us to learn today, as scientists continue to warn us about climate change and places like California (which supplies much of our produce) have suffered repeated years of drought and wildfire.

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.