Who Were the First People In the U.S. And Where Did They Come From?

 

The Clans

Richard Calmit Adams (1864-1921)

When the waters were so mighty
As to reach the mountains high,
And it seemed that all creation

Surely then was doomed to die,
Came the turtle to our rescue,
Brought us safely unto land,
For the Manitou had sent him;
Now we’re called “The Turtle Clan.”

The Wolf band comes from children,
Whom a she-wolf nursed with care,
And thus restored the children
Who were giv’n up in despair.
Her wailing brought the hunters
To the babies where they lay;
So a band among the people
Is the Wolf Clan of today.

When the tribe was once in danger,
A wild turkey gave alarm,
And the warriors met the foeman
With the fury of a storm,
To a maiden, in a vision,
Did the turkey show the plan,
And we call all her descendants
To this day, the “Turkey Clan.”

Are you like me? Have you wondered whether the first Native Americans migration really came from Asia across the Bering Land Bridge 20,000 to 40,000 years ago? Or, were the first inhabitants from someplace else? Some researchers have argued that Alaskan glaciers would have blocked entry into North America; thus, no settlement from the land bridge would have been possible at that time.

The “Beringia standstill hypothesis” suggests that human populations would have remained stranded on this land bridge for some 15,000 years before ice melt finally allowed clear passage into the continent. From there, this main emigrant population would have split and diversified into many different first cultures.

(Tia Ghose. “Humans May Have Been Stuck on Bering Strait for 10,000 Years. LiveScience. February 27, 2014.)

New research suggests entry via other routes. From where? Read on.

Researchers recently dated a set of animal bones found in Coxcatlán Cave to around 30,000 years ago – completely upending previous estimates of when humans first arrived in the Americas. A team of anthropologists from Iowa State University now believe that humans arrived in America 30,000 years ago – and they did so by sea.

Radiocarbon-dating of a set of bones found in a cave used by early man suggests humans arrived in America 20,000 years earlier than believed, long before the migration across the Bering Land Bridge.

Coxcatlán Cave in Mexico is believed to have once been inhabited by early man. Anthropologists are studying the origins of farming in the Tehuacán Valley of Mexico, where early humans first began experimenting with agriculture. Several domesticated plants have been found there in previous studies, including the bones of animals believed to have been hunted by early man, which were found back in the 1960s, but not radiocarbon-dated until recently

After radiocarbon-dating the samples, the researchers learned that the bones found in Coxcatlan were between 33,448 and 28,279 years old.

“We were just trying to situate our agricultural study with a firmer timeline,” Iowa State anthropologist Andrew Somerville said. “We were surprised to find these really old dates at the bottom of the cave, and it means that we need to take a closer look at the artifacts recovered from those levels.”

(Leah Silverman. “Discovery In Mexico Indicates The First Americans Arrived 20,000 Years Before We Thought.” allthatsinteresting.com. June 4, 2021.)

Previous studies dated only plant and charcoal remains which, according to Somerville, provide a far less accurate age than bones. Somerville added that even though previous studies had not dated the artifacts found at the bottommost layer of the cave, he never anticipated that they would be this old.

Though anthropologists believed the bones were the remains of a human feast, more evidence is needed to prove that. Somerville said the kind of evidence he and other researchers will be looking for includes cut marks in the bones as well as evidence that they have been boiled or held over a fire in order to indicate whether they were handled by humans.

And if all that evidence suggests that humans were, in fact, settled in that Mexican cave up to 33,000 years ago, then that means they could not have possibly arrived on the continent by land.

Lead author of that study, Loren Davis, said at the time that his team’s findings lend “great support to the idea that people came down the Pacific Coast instead.”

It’s thought that if humans did come by boat, then they likely would have sailed from Asia across the Pacific, landing on the western side of America and then moving eastward by foot. Of course, more evidence is needed to support this theory.

(Leah Silverman. “Discovery In Mexico Indicates The First Americans Arrived 20,000 Years Before We Thought.” allthatsinteresting.com. June 4, 2021.)

Somerville isn’t the first to posit that early man arrived by sea. A study conducted in Idaho and published in 2019 suggested that humans were already living in the region 16,000 years ago, about a millennium before the Land Bridge was accessible.

Cooper's Ferry Site and Others

Artifacts recently unearthed at a site in western Idaho called “Cooper’s Ferry” indicate that humans were living there 16,000 years ago, pushing back the timeline of human habitation in North America. It is now believed that the Cooper’s Valley location is “one of the oldest archaeological sites in the Americas” reports National Geographic.

In recent years, archaeologists have found numerous sites and artifacts older than that migration timeline, suggesting that early humans didn’t travel through the ice but followed the coast, likely using boats. A site called Monte Verde at the southern tip of Chile is at least 15,000 years old, a sinkhole in Florida recently yielded a knife and butchered mammoth bone more than 14,500 years old and the Gault site in Texas has yielded thousands of artifacts that could be 16,000 to 20,000 years old.

Cooper's Ferry has yielded a cache of stone points, known as “western stemmed points” that were used as weapons and tools and dated to 13,500 years ago. Archaeologists also found “work spaces for making and repairing tools, butchering sites, and fragments of animal bone” reports National Geographic. A layer of charcoal was found, and this was carbon dated and to the amazement of all it was dated to 14000 years ago.

Radiocarbon dating and Bayesian analysis were carried out on other organic material found at Cooper’s Ferry. These results “indicate that people repeatedly occupied the Columbia River basin, starting between 16,560 and 15,280 calibrated years before the present.” The academic consensus is that the Clovis People, who were “big game hunters” according to Science, were the first people to settle in the Americas and they came from North-East Asia.

(Ed Whelan. “First Americans Arrived by Sea Over 15,000 Years Ago, Surprise Finding Suggests.” Ancient Origins. August 30, 2019.)

The finds at the Cooper’s Ferry site are the final nail in the coffin of the Clovis theory argues Todd Braje of San Diego State University, who reviewed the new paper in the journal Science “[T]he Clovis-first model is no longer viable,” he says.

From Where Did the First Americans Originate?

There is a controversial theory that the first humans to people the Americas came from the Pacific Islands. Another theory is that they came from North-East Asia by a coastal route. Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that they possibly arrived by “following a coastal “kelp highway” full of sheltered bays and rich with food.”

(T. J. Braje, T. D. Dillehay, J. M. Erlandson, R. G. Klein, T. C. Rick. “Erratum for the Perspective “Finding the first Americans” Science, Vol. 358. November 03, 2017.)

The simplest explanation is that the earliest migrants to North America traveled up river to reach Idaho. “The Cooper's Ferry site is located along the Salmon River, which is a tributary of the larger Columbia River basin. Early peoples moving south along the Pacific coast would have encountered the Columbia River as the first place below the glaciers where they could easily walk and paddle in to North America,” says Loren Davis, Oregon State University anthropologist and lead author of the study.

“Essentially, the Columbia River corridor was the first off-ramp of a Pacific coast migration route. The timing and position of the Cooper's Ferry site is consistent with and most easily explained as the result of an early Pacific coastal migration.”

(Jason Daley. “Idaho Site Shows Humans Were in North America 16,000 Years Ago.” Smithsonian Magazine. August 30, 2019.)

Lizzie Wade, contributing correspondent for Science, writes, “... It's tempting to envision such a migration as a race from beach to beach. But as people expanded into the uninhabited Americas, they had no destination in mind. They stopped, settled in, ventured beyond what they knew, and backtracked into what they did. So the first step for archaeologists is to figure out where, exactly, those early mariners would have chosen to stick around.

Loren Davis of Oregon State University has been painstakingly mapping the probable courses of ancient rivers across the now-drowned coastline, hoping that those channels are still detectable, despite now being filled with sediment and covered by deep ocean.

Davis says …

“The decision likely came down to one resource: freshwater. Water is the lifeblood of everything.”

(Lizzie Wade. “Most archaeologists think the first Americans arrived by boat. Now, they’re beginning to prove it.” Science. August 10, 2017.)

The Cooper's Ferry site revealed a style of stone projectile point that resembles artifacts of similar age on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. So that supports the idea that the migration that led to the first Americans may have begun in that area, when Hokkaido was part of a larger land mass, Davis said. Or it could have started somewhere else in northeast Asia, but still reflect a cultural contribution of the Hokkaido area, he said.

A migration from the Hokkaido area could have skirted the southern coast of Beringea before heading south along the Pacific, Davis said.

Dennis Jenkins, senior research archaeologist at the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History, said the Idaho site appears to go back 16,000 years. He also said the paper provides "a major advance" by linking early Americans to Japan more firmly than before.

Michael Waters of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M said he prefers an age of between 14,200 years and 15,000 years ago. That would put it in the time frame of several sites in Texas, Wisconsin and Oregon, he said. As for the Japan connection, "I think they're on to something there."

(Malcolm Ritter. “Idaho artifacts suggest Pacific entry for first Americans.” Associated Press. KHOU-11 TV. August 29, 2019.)

However, paleoanthropologist John Hoffecker at the University of Colorado at Boulder reports previous analyses of genes and teeth "do not support an origin for Native Americans out of northern Japan, beyond any reasonable doubt.”

Archaeologist Ben Potter at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks suggested the similarities between the Cooper's Ferry and ancient Japanese artifacts were superficial, and that microblades and other artifacts typically seen at ancient Japanese sites were not found at Cooper's Ferry or elsewhere in North America.

(Charles Q. Choi. “Mounting Evidence Suggests People First Came to North America by Boat.” Inside Science. August 29, 2019.)

Ancient skeletons can reveal the history of migration.

What's DNA Say About People in Central and South America?

South and not north – here is research about migration into the region.

Findings published online in the journal Cell, report people genetically linked to the Clovis culture, one of the earliest continent-wide cultures in North America, made it down to South America as far back as 11,000 years ago. Then, they mysteriously vanished around 9,000 years ago, new research reveals.

Where did they go? It appears that another ancient group of people replaced them, but it's unclear how or why this happened, the researchers said.

To unravel the genetic mysteries of the these ancient Americans, researchers reached out to indigenous peoples and government agencies all over Central and South America, asking for permission to study the remains of ancient peoples that have been discovered over the years.

In all, the international team of scientists was given permission to do genomewide analyses on 49 ancient people whose remains were unearthed in the following Central and South American countries: Belize, Brazil, Peru, Chile and Argentina. The oldest of these people lived about 11,000 years ago, marking this as a study that takes a big step forward from previous research, which only included genetic data from people less than 1,000 years old, the researchers said.

Co-lead author Cosimo Posth, postdoctoral researcher of archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, reports …

“DNA associated with the North American Clovis culture was found in people from Chile, Brazil and Belize, but only between about 11,000 to 9,000 years ago.

"A key discovery was that a Clovis culture-associated individual from North America dating to around 12,800 years ago shares distinctive ancestry with the oldest Chilean, Brazilian and Belizean individuals. This supports the hypothesis that the expansion of people who spread the Clovis culture in North America also reached Central and South America.

“The Cell study also revealed a surprising connection between ancient people living in California's Channel Islands and the southern Peruvian Andes at least 4,200 years ago. It appears that these two geographically distant groups have a shared ancestry.”

"It could be that this ancestry arrived in South America thousands of years before and we simply don't have earlier individuals showing it," study co-lead researcher Nathan Nakatsuka, a research assistant in the Reich lab at Harvard Medical School, said in the statement. "There is archaeological evidence that the population in the Central Andes area greatly expanded after around 5,000 years ago. Spreads of particular subgroups during these events may be why we detect this ancestry afterward."

(Cosimo Posth et al. “Reconstructing the Deep Population History of Central and South America.” Cell. November 08, 2018.)

It's unlikely that people living in the Channel Islands actually traveled south to Peru, the researchers said. Rather, it's possible that these groups' ancestors sallied forth thousands of years earlier, with some ending up in the Channel Islands and others in South America. But those genes didn't become common in Peru until much later, around 4,200 years ago, when the population may have exploded, the researchers said.

Native American (Indians)

If you ask Native American Indians where the first people came from, they insist “out of the ground.” These are stories related to origin and creation stories all over the Americas. Native tribes have clear stories about how they got here, coming out of caves or up through springs and underground sources. The idea of coming from somewhere else might threaten the notion that they have primacy on the lands.

Scientists looking at Indian DNA say the DNA of the Ancient Paleo-Siberians is remarkably similar to that of Native Americans. A skeleton in Siberia nearly 10,000 years old has yielded DNA that reveals a striking kinship to living Native Americans.

In 2015, a study using advanced genetic techniques came to a similar conclusion. Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley and colleagues found that the "vast majority" of Native Americans must have originated from just one colonization event.

(Maanasa Raghavan et al. “Genomic evidence for the Pleistocene and recent population history of Native Americans.” Science, 21. August 2015.)

The California study found that the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans, including Athabascans and Amerindians, entered the Americas as a single migration wave from Siberia no earlier than 23 thousand years ago and after no more than an 8000-year isolation period in Beringia. After their arrival to the Americas, ancestral Native Americans diversified into two basal genetic branches around 13 (thousand calendar years ago) one that is now dispersed across North and South America and the other restricted to North America

At the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, temperatures began to rise and the glaciers that covered North America slowly began to melt. The first peoples to enter the Americas from Beringia are thought to have done so shortly after a route opened up along the west coast, about 15,000 years ago.

Travel by boat would have allowed very rapid southward movement, making it possible for people to establish themselves at the early site of Monte Verde in Chile by 14,220 YBP, as well as a number of other sites in North America of similar ages. Whether there was southward travel by Clovis peoples via the ice-free corridor once it opened remains unresolved.

(Jennifer Raff. “What the ancient DNA discovery tells us about Native American ancestry.” The Guardian. January 03, 2018.)

Dr. Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and a co-author of the 2019 study “The population History of Northeastern Siberia Since the Pleistocene,” estimates that Native Americans can trace about two-thirds of their ancestry to these previously unknown people.

(Martin Kikora. “The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocene.” Nature, 570. June 05, 2019.)

One reason that the Ancient Paleo-Siberians were unknown until now is that they were mostly replaced by a third population of people with a different East Asian ancestry. This group moved into Siberia only in the past 10,000 years — and they are the progenitors of most living Siberians.

The Kolyma individual lived long after the origin of the Native American branch. Dr. Willerslev estimates that the ancestors of Native Americans and Ancient Paleo-Siberians split 24,000 years ago.

The story gets more complicated: Shortly after that split, the ancestors of Native Americans encountered another population with genetic ties to Europe. All living Native Americans carry a mixture of genes from these two groups.

In its research on ancient DNA, Dr. Willerslev’s team found evidence that a second wave of Ancient Paleo-Siberians reached Alaska sometime between 9,000 and 6,000 years ago. They made contact with Native Americans there and interbred.

Conclusions?

And, there's reason to believe the first inhabitants of the U.S. came from everywhere.

To think of the arrival of the first people as one group may be inaccurate. The story of the first settlers in America has been derived from a complex history of many people with many different stories. Exactly when and who did what will likely be forever debated.