Peopling the Americas

Hey Becca. Hey Kim. All right, so we're talking about how people got to the Americas today. So when did people first arrive in North America? Was Columbus the first one?

So no, he was not. You know, back in the day, people believed that actually, pre-Columbus, no one was here. But in this video, I'm not going to be talking about if right there definitely were people here, but I'll be talking about how people got here, when, and who they were. And so these are the questions that historians and archaeologists are still debating today.

So Kim, who are archaeologists? Well, archaeologists are scholars who work in the land. They will dig in the places where people lived in the past, find remains of earlier civilizations, and use that evidence to build a picture of what life was like in a place before there was a written record.

So a lot of the history we'll talk about in this video has to do with different evidence and competing evidence that archaeologists have found in the land that we now call the United States. So as I mentioned, we're not arguing if there were people here because there definitely were. There were even big cities and towns and people living together in societies that looked a lot like what the colonists were trying to make as well.

Yeah, I think people often have the misconception that Native Americans were primarily hunter-gatherers who pretty much lived in very small bands that didn't leave much of a record of buildings or living sites. They were more nomadic. But people were all over North America, and they had societies that were very different from each other, some of which were very complex politically and some of which were quite large cities.

This city here is Cahokia, which is a fun thing to say. I know, I love the name Cahokia. Close to modern-day St. Louis, this was the largest city in the Americas. About 40,000 to maybe 60,000 people lived in this city, and it's going to be the largest city in the Americas until the 1780s when Philadelphia has more people.

Wow, that is just really remarkable. So 40,000 people here in Cahokia, and there were still historical records that said that there was no one here?

Well, you know, history is something that is highly influenced by the kind of narratives that historians want to tell. We know that humans, as a species today, originated somewhere in Africa and then spread throughout Europe and Asia to other landmasses. So how did they get the North American continent?

So we don't know for sure, but archaeologists and historians have pretty much agreed that the Native Americans came through the Bering Strait, which you can see right here. This was this big ice sheet during the Ice Age that connected Asia and North America, through Alaska. So the Native Americans came from Asia. They were Asian, really, and they walked across the Bering Strait and down into North America. What is now water at that time was covered with ice.

So I'm guessing they're following herds of animals that they might like to eat?

Yes, exactly. And these were called the Paleo Indians. So they were the first Indians. Paleo Indians really means ancient people, so these were the ancient people, and they were, again, following different animals.

So historians estimate that the Paleo Indians came down through the Bering Strait about 13,000 years ago.

So wow, that was a long time ago, but now different archaeological evidence may point to the Paleo Indians coming over much earlier than that, actually more like 16,000 years ago.

And that, yeah, I mean, 3,000 years is a significant difference. I mean, think about 3,000 years earlier than today; we'd be talking a thousand BCE. So today, archaeologists and historians kind of argue about when exactly it was, and lots of different evidence and fossils and archaeological digs are coming up with evidence that points us more towards 16,000 than 13,000.

So it was actually in 1925 when archaeologists found the first Clovis point. So they're called Clovis points because in 1925 archaeologists found these kind of arrowheads. They're very small, probably nothing more than like two centimeters.

Wow, but they found them in Clovis, New Mexico. So over here in New Mexico, and estimated that they were about 13,000 years old. So that's kind of our old hypotheses that humans were hunting with these Clovis points 13,000 years ago, probably buffalo or bison, or any other kind of larger animal that they would need to carve out of stone.

These arrowheads to shoot without bow and arrow most likely these larger animals to eat.

So this is some of the first evidence that leads archaeologists to an interpretation of when human habitation first occurred in North America.

Exactly, and this was kind of the overwhelming consensus for a really long time. All throughout the 1900s, people were digging up different artifacts all across North America, finding more Clovis points, and kind of all agree it was about 13,000 years ago that they came again down through here and all around, and that's why we were finding these Clovis points. But then in 1997, not too long ago at all, actually, a Vanderbilt archaeologist, his name is Tom Dillahaye, found evidence of humanity in Chile, all the way down here.

So it seemed that the humans were living about 14,000 years ago, so it would have only taken them a thousand years to get all the way from up here down here. So now there's kind of two competing hypotheses. Either they traveled by land through the Bering Strait and got all the way down here in just a thousand years by foot. I mean, they're really moving, or they actually were using some sort of maritime vessel to get down. They were in a boat.

But there's just these small different theories within this archaeological movement about exactly how they moved about and exactly when. There's also this new branch of DNA science, which is enlightening historians about who the first Native Americans were and who their direct ancestors are. These Paleo Indians, they're coming from Alaska, they're coming from Siberia, I guess, up there.

So are there direct ancestors? Russians? Asians? The DNA evidence points that the Paleo Indians were most closely related to the Asians. They moved through Asia and down through the Bering Strait.

Interesting. So that kind of corroborates the archaeological record, right? If we say that somewhere between 10 and 16,000 years ago, there was a splintering of this population from the Asian population, the Bering Strait became water again, and now in sort of classic Darwin fashion, we have two separated populations evolving differently.

Exactly, and the DNA definitely corroborates that evidence. So today archaeologists and DNA scientists are working together to figure out really which of these hypotheses is more true: Did they move by land, or was it by water? And they want to learn more about exactly who were they? Yeah, they were Asian, but how did they distance themselves from the rest of the East Asian population? And really, what motivated them to come down through the Bering Strait and explore this territory?

One thing that I think is really important to take away from this is that if you look at the history of the Americas, you start 16,000 years ago, and the history of Europeans in America is just a tiny fraction of that time. So the history of America starts long before 1776, long before 1492. It starts when the first people came to America 15,000 years ago, and the Paleo Indians started their own American history much before Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.

Right, and archaeologists are continuing to learn more about the first Americans and really the beginning of American history.