No "Lost Tribes" or Aliens: What ancient DNA reveals about American Prehistory

New genetics research settles questions about the peoples of Newfoundland & Labrador – & helps highlight what genetics can’t tell us

The Guardian By Jennifer Raff
14 Feb 2018 16.33 EST

Genetics research has transformed our understanding of human history, particularly in the Americas. The focus of the majority of high profile ancient DNA papers in recent years has been on addressing early events in the initial peopling of the Americas. This research has provided details of this early history that we couldn’t access though the archeological record.

Collectively, genetics studies have shown us that the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas are descended from a group that diverged from its Siberian ancestors beginning sometime around 23,000 years before present & remained isolated in Beringia (the region of land that once connected Siberia & North America) for an extended period of time. When the glaciers covering North America melted enough to make the Pacific coast navigable, southward travel became possible, & patterned genetic diversity across North & South America reflects these early movements.

Recent ancient DNA studies indicate that approximately 13,000 years ago, two clades (genetic groups) of peoples emerged; one exclusively consisting of northern Native Americans, & one consisting of peoples from North, Central, & South America, including the 12,800 year old Anzick child from a Clovis burial site in Montana. All genetics research to date has affirmed the shared ancestry of all ancient & contemporary indigenous peoples of the Americas, & refuted stories about the presence of “lost tribes”, ancient Europeans, & !ancient aliens!

Events that occurred after people first entered the Americas – how they settled in different parts of the continents, adapted to local environments, interacted with each other, & were affected by European colonialism – have received somewhat less attention in the press, but as can be seen in the links above, there have been some very significant research papers published on these topics. One such paper...Genetic Discontinuity between the Maritime Archaic & Beothuk Populations in Newfoundland, Canada by Duggen et al. (2017), explores the genetic diversity within three different ancient groups who lived in Newfoundland & Labrador.

One reason this region is of particular interest is that it’s on the furthest northeastern margin of North America & so was one of the last areas in the Americas to be peopled. It appears to have been occupied successively by three culturally distinct groups beginning about 10,000 years before present (YBP) in Labrador & 6,000 YBP in Newfoundland: the Maritime Archaic, the Paleo-Inuit (also referred to as the Paleo-Eskimo), & the indigenous peoples that Europeans called the Beothuk. Today the region is home to several indigenous groups, including the Inuit, the Innu, the Mi’kmaq & the Southern Inuit of NunatuKavut.

The members of the Maritime Archaic tradition created the oldest known burial mounds in North America (dating to 7,714 YBP) & subsisted upon coastal marine resources. Approximately 3,400 YBP they seem to have abandoned Newfoundland, either in response to the appearance of Paleo-Inuit in the region or because of climate changes. The Paleo-Inuit’s presence on the island overlapped with the peoples referred to as the Beothuk beginning around 2000 YBP. The Beothuk encountered European settlers in 1500 AD, & in response to their presence gradually moved to the interior of the island, where their populations declined.

The last known Beothuk, Shanawdithit, died of tuberculosis in captivity in 1829. Although it remains possible that Beothuk traces of ancestry persist in contemporary residents of NL, including members of the Innu, Mi’kmaq, & European communities, it is generally accepted that the Beothuk became culturally extinct with the death of Shanawdithit.

By analyzing mitochondrial haplogroups (groups of closely related maternal lineages) present within individuals from all three populations, Dugan et al. addressed the question of whether they were genetically similar or whether all three groups were biologically as well as culturally distinct from each other. This happens to be one of the most fundamental questions that arises when studying the past: do cultural changes in the archaeological record of a region represent the arrival of new groups, or did one group of people living in the same region over time adopt new cultural practices & technologies from others?

In the case of Newfoundland, the three groups were genetically distinct; they do not share any maternal haplogroups except for haplogroup X2a, lineages of which were found in both the Maritime Archaic & Beothuk. (The presence of haplogroup X2a in North American populations has sometimes been cited as evidence for European ancestry in ancient Americans...

Apart from that single exception, the Maritime Archaic, Paleo-Inuit, & Beothuk are clearly genetically distinctive from one another. However, it’s important to note that this study was done on mitochondrial DNA, which is exclusively matrilineally inherited, & so we can only say that the three groups were not maternally related. While they indicate that the groups are genetically different from each other, does that mean that there was no shared ancestry between them at all? It’s unclear without looking at the rest of the genome whether, for example, there might have been any paternal lineages shared between the populations...

As this study shows, we can learn a lot about the past by characterizing the genomes of ancient & contemporary peoples. This paper by Duggen et al. adds to decades of study of the genomes from ancient & contemporary peoples of the Americas, which reveals a nuanced picture of their complex & remarkable history of evolution, interaction, & resilience in the face of unbelievable oppression.

But it’s also important to understand what genetics can’t tell us...

All claims that a person’s tribe or indigenous nationality can be determined from their genomes are scientifically inaccurate. First, this is because there simply are no currently known genetic markers that allow us to identify individual tribes or nations; although we see geographically patterned genetic variation throughout the Americas in ancient & contemporary populations which allows us to differentiate them (as done in this study), genetic lineages are not tribal or nation-specific.

More importantly, who is or is not a member of a particular community is determined by indigenous groups’ own standards of belonging, which are often just as much about relations & community ties as they are about biological descent...

DNA reveals new group of Native Americans: the ancient Beringians

An illustration of the Upward Sun River camp in what is now Interior Alaska.

Genetic analysis of a baby girl who died at the end of the last ice age shows she belonged to a previously unknown ancient group of Native Americans

The Guardian 14 Feb 2018 16.33 EST
by Eric S. Carlson in collaboration with Ben A. Potter

A baby girl who lived & died in what is now Alaska at the end of the last ice age belonged to a previously unknown group of ancient Native Americans, according to DNA recovered from her bones.

The child, a mere six weeks old when she died, was found in a burial pit next to the remains of a stillborn baby, perhaps a first cousin, during excavations of an 11,500-year-old residential camp in Tanana River Valley in Central Alaska. The remains were discovered in 2013, but a full genetic analysis has not been possible until now.

Researchers tried to recover ancient DNA from both of the infants but succeeded only in the case of the larger individual. They had expected her genetic material to resemble modern northern or southern lineages of Native Americans, but found instead that she had a distinct genetic makeup that made her a member of a separate population.

The newly-discovered group, named “ancient Beringians,” appears to have split off from the founding population of Native Americans about 20,000 years ago. While the ancestors of other Native Americans pushed south into the continent as the ice caps thawed, the ancient Beringians remained in the north until they eventually died out.

“This is a new population of Native Americans,” said Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, whose team recovered the girl’s DNA from a dense part of her skull known as the petrous bone. Details of the work are published in Nature.

Working with scientists at the University of Alaska & elsewhere, Willerslev compared the genetic makeup of the baby, named Xach’itee’aanenh t’eede gaay or “sunrise child-girl” by the local community, with genomes from other ancient & modern people. They found that nearly half of the girl’s DNA came from the ancient north Eurasians who lived in what is now Siberia. The rest of her genetic makeup was a roughly even mix of DNA now carried by the northern & southern Native Americans.

Using evolutionary models, the researchers showed that the ancestors of the first Native Americans started to emerge as a distinct population about 35,000 years ago, probably in north-east Asia. About 25,000 years ago, this group mixed & bred with ancient north Eurasians in the region, the descendants of whom went on to become the first Native Americans to settle the New World.

During the last ice age, so much water was locked up in the ice caps that a land bridge reached from Asia to North America across what is now the Bering Strait. Willerslev believes the ancestors of Native Americans travelled to the continent in a single wave of migration more than 20,000 years ago. Those who settled in the north became the isolated ancient Beringians, he said, while those who moved south, around or through the ice sheets, split into the north & south Native Americans about 15,700 years ago.

But there is another possibility. Ben Potter, an archaeologist on the team from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, suspects that the Beringians split from the ancestors of other Native Americans in Asia before both groups made their way across the land bridge to North America in separate migrations. “The support for this scenario is pretty strong,” he said. “We have no evidence of people in the Beringia region 20,000 years ago.”

The families who lived at the ancient camp may have spent months there, Potter said. Excavations at the site, known as Upward Sun River, have revealed at least three tent structures that would have provided shelter. The two babies were found in a burial pit beneath a hearth where families cooked salmon caught in the local river. The cremated remains of a third child, who died at the age of three, were found on top of the hearth at the abandoned camp.

Connie Mulligan, an anthropologist at the University of Florida, said the findings pointed to a single migration of people from Asia to the New World, but said other questions remained. “How did people move so quickly to the southernmost point of South America & settle two continents that span a huge climatic & geographic range?” she said.

David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University, said the work boosted the case for a single migration into Alaska, but did not rule out alternatives involving multiple waves of migration. He added that he was unconvinced that the ancient Beringian group split from the ancestors of other Native Americans 20,000 years ago, because even tiny errors in scientists’ data can lead to radically different split times for evolutionary lineages. “While the 19,000-21,000 year date would have important implications if true & may very well be right, I am not convinced that there is compelling evidence that the initial split date is that old,” he said.

What an ancient DNA discovery tells us about Native American ancestry

A new genome from a Pleistocene burial in Alaska confirms a longstanding model for the initial peopling of the Americas

Surprise as DNA reveals new group of Native Americans: the ancient Beringians

The Guardian By Jennifer Raff
Wed 14 Feb 2018 16.38 EST

A little over 11,000 years ago, a grieving family in Central Alaska laid to rest a six-week-old baby girl, a three-year-old child, & a preterm female fetus. According to their custom, the children were interred under a hearth inside their home & provisioned with the carefully crafted stone points & bone foreshafts of hunting lances. We don’t know their names, but the peoples who live in the region today (the Tanana Athabaskans) call one of the girls Xach’itee’aanenh t’eede gaay (sunrise child-girl) & the other Yełkaanenh t’eede gaay (dawn twilight child-girl). Their remains were discovered a few years ago at a site known today as the Upward Sun River.

These children carried the history of their ancestors within their DNA, & with the permission of their descendants they are now teaching us about the early events in the peopling of the Americas. A new paper in Nature, Terminal Pleistocene Alaskan genome reveals first founding population of Native Americans by Moreno-Mayar et al., analyzes the complete genome of one of these children. This genome gives us a glimpse of the genetic diversity present in Late Pleistocene Beringians, the ancestors of Native Americans, & confirms a decades-old hypothesis for the early peopling of the Americas.

The indigenous peoples of the Americas are descended from a group of people who crossed a land connection between Asia & North America sometime during the Last Glacial Maximum (26,500 to 19,000 years before present, or YBP).

The prevailing model for how this happened is known as the Beringian Standstill (or Pause or Incubation, depending on who you ask), which was originally conceived of based on classical genetic markers & fully developed by the analysis of maternally inherited mitochondrial genomes . This model states that the ancient Beringians must have experienced a long period of isolation from all other populations. (Estimates for the length of this isolation vary, but the lower end – roughly 7,000 years – is about as long as the period between the invention of beer brewing & the Apollo 11 landing). During this period they developed the genetic variation uniquely found in Native American populations.

This isolation likely took place in Beringia. Environmental reconstructions based on ancient plant remains taken from soil cores, as well as computer temperature models show that it was actually a relatively decent place to live during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Large regions of Beringia would have had warmer temperatures than Siberia & shrub tundra with plants & animals available to support a sizeable human population. Although we don’t have any direct archaeological evidence of people living in central Beringia during the LGM – because that region is currently underneath the ocean – we do have evidence that people were living year round in western Beringia (present-day Siberia) at the Yana Rhinocerous Horn sites by 30,000 YBP & in eastern Beringia (present-day Yukon, in Canada) by about 20-22,000 YBP at the Bluefish Caves site.

At the end of the LGM, temperatures began to rise & 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, but there is at least some evidence against it.

Today there remain a number of questions about the details of the Beringian Incubation model: 1) Which population(s) contributed to the ancestry of the earliest Native Americans? 2) When & where did their ancestors become isolated, & how long did this isolation last? 3) How did people initially enter the Americas from Beringia? 4) When & how did the patterned genetic variation that we see in Native American populations emerge?

Ancient genomes from people who lived in the Americas & in Siberia during or shortly after the LGM can help provide answers to some of these questions. But there aren’t very many burials that date to this period, so the Upward Sun River child’s genome is very significant. It strongly confirms the Beringian Incubation/Standstill model. In this region of Alaska today, we only see a subset of Native American-specific mitochondrial haplogroups: those which are uniquely restricted to the Arctic & Subarctic. But the Beringian Standstill model predicted that ancestral Beringians should have all “founder” mitochondrial lineages present in ancient & contemporary Native Americans. In the absence of any ancient DNA dating to the Late Pleistocene, this remained an unsolvable puzzle.

But when the first genetic data from two of the Upward Sun River children was successfully recovered by Justin Tackney et al. in 2015, we discovered that they had mitochondrial lineages (C1b & B2) not typical of contemporary peoples of the region. We hypothesized that they might represent the descendants of a remnant ancient Beringian population, but it was impossible to test this hypothesis without additional data from the nuclear genomes. Moreno-Mayar et al.’s nuclear genome results from one of the children (the other didn’t yield enough nuclear DNA for analysis) confirm that she belonged to a group that had remained in Beringia after Native Americans began their migration southward into the Americas. We know that because this child is equally related to all indigenous populations in the Americas. She did not belong to either of the two major Native American genetic groups (Southern & Northern), but was equally related to both of them. One interpretation of this result is that her ancestors must have remained in Alaska after splitting from the ancestors of Native Americans sometime around 20,000 YBP. Her genome, provides new insight into the genetic diversity present in the ancestral Beringian population. One important component of that is that it gives us new estimates of the approximate dates of key events:

~36,000 YBP: The ancestors of the ancient Beringians began to separate from East Asians, but gene flow between them continues until about 25,000 YBP

~25-20,000 YBP: This population experienced gene flow with the ancient North Eurasian population (to which the Mal’ta boy belonged)

~20,000 YBP: The ancestors of the Upward Sun River child diverged from the ancestors of other Native Americans.

~17,000-14,600 YBP: The two major clades (genetic groups) of Native Americans differentiate from one another.

 We still have a tremendous amount to learn about the origins & evolution of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Rejecting the Solutrean hypothesis: the First Peoples in the Americas were not from Europe

A recent Canadian documentary promoted a fringe idea in American archaeology that’s both scientifically wrong & racist

The Guardian Jennifer Raff
 22 Feb 2018 04.26 EST

The recent release of The Ice Bridge, an episode in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series The Nature of Things has revived public discussion of a controversial idea about how the Americas were peopled known as the “Solutrean hypothesis.” This idea suggests a European origin for the peoples who made the Clovis tools, the first recognized stone tool tradition in the Americas...

First, in addition to the scientific problems with the Solutrean hypothesis which, it’s important to note that it has overt political & cultural implications in denying that Native Americans are the only indigenous peoples of the continents. The notion that the ancestors of Native Americans were not the first or only people on the continent has great popularity among white nationalists, who see it as a means of denying Native Americans an ancestral claim on their land. Indeed, although this particular iteration is new, the idea behind the Solutrean hypothesis is part of a long tradition of Europeans trying to insert themselves into American prehistory; justifying colonialism by claiming that Native Americans were not capable of creating the diverse & sophisticated material culture of the Americas. Unfortunately, the producers of the documentary deliberately chose not to address this issue head-on, nor did they include any critical perspectives from indigenous peoples...

Bruce Bradley & Dennis Stanford, proponents of the Solutrean hypothesis, base it on the claim that the North American Clovis stone spear points are the technological descendants of a subset of those made by the Upper Paleolithic southwestern European Solutrean peoples. Specifically they cite fact that both are made by a technique known as “overshot” flaking as evidence for their common origin. From this starting point, Bradley & Stanford propose a scenario in which a group of Solutreans migrated across the Atlantic Ocean to North America via an “ice bridge” approximately 20,000 years before present (YBP).

Although they don’t deny that the majority of Native American ancestry comes from a group of Siberians who lived in Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum (~23,000 YBP-13,000 YBP), they claim that “great numbers” of Solutreans must also have migrated to North America.  Archaeologists have...dismissed it on the basis of insufficient evidence...

1. There’s a serious time gap between when the Solutreans could have crossed the Atlantic via the ice bridge (~20,000 YBP) & when Clovis tools begin to show up in the archaeological record (~13,000 YBP). This means that they would have made the points in exactly the same way for 7,000 years. Nowhere else in the Americas do we see technologies & cultures existing unchanging for that length of time.

2. There is no evidence of boat use, or tools used for making boats at Solutrean sites. Although the Ice Bridge documentary makes much of an image of a fish & an auk in a French cave, it is a bit of a stretch to claim that this is sufficient to demonstrate a sophisticated seafaring culture, capable of crossing the Atlantic. The existence of a year-round “ice bridge” across the Atlantic during the Last Glacial Maximum is not supported by paleoclimate data. Instead, sea ice in the Atlantic would most likely have been seasonal, with a connection between North American & Europe only a few months out of the year.

3. The notion of overshot flaking technique as evidence of a link between Clovis & Solutrean has been challenged by many archaeologists, who think it far more plausible that the two cultures arrived at the same technology independently. As Strauss (2000) puts it, “One or two technical attributes are insufficient to establish a cultural link or long-distance interconnection.”

4. Radiocarbon dates of Clovis sites do not show a pattern one would expect if people diffused into North America from the east coast, as postulated by Stanford & Bradley.

Geneticists, too, have tested the Solutrean hypothesis. If it were true, we would expect to see ancestry from non-Siberian descended populations present in the genomes of ancient Native Americans. We don’t. All contemporary & ancient Native Americans, including the only known ancient individual buried in association with Clovis tools, show descent from an ancestral population with Siberian roots. There is a very clear pattern of evolutionary history recorded in ancient genomes from Siberia, Beringia, & North America, & no evidence for trans-Atlantic gene flow.

This is where the Ice Bridge documentary runs into great problems. It ignores all genomic evidence & instead relies upon an old idea that a particular mitochondrial haplogroup (a group of closely related maternal lineages) known as X shows a connection between North America & Europe. In the documentary, pediatrician/popular science writer Stephen Oppenheimer asserts that the presence of haplogroup X in an ancient North American population is a priori evidence for a European connection. The documentary makes this case persuasively with graphics & maps showing the presence of this haplogroup in both Europe & North America. But look below the surface & the entire argument falls apart. First of all, Standford, Bradley, & Oppenheimer simply assume that Solutreans would have had X because it’s seen in contemporary European populations. But in fact, the contemporary European gene pool was formed only within the last 8,000 years, & it’s unknown whether earlier peoples would have had haplogroup X in the same frequencies (or at all). No genomes from Solutren peoples have ever been sequenced...

Today, lineages of haplogroup X are found widely dispersed throughout Europe, Asia, North Africa, & North America. We can reconstruct their evolutionary relationships – much like you can reconstruct a family tree – by looking at patterns of shared & derived mutations. Lineages found in the Americas, X2a & X2g, are not descended from the lineages (X2b, X2d, & X2c) found in Europe. Instead, they share a very ancient common ancestor from Eurasia, X2...

X2a is of a comparable age to other indigenous American haplogroups (A,B,C,D), which would not be true if it was derived from a separate migration from Europe. Finally, the oldest lineage of X2a found in the Americas was recovered from the Ancient One (also known as Kennewick Man), an ancient individual dating to ~9,000 years ago & from the West Coast (not the East Coast as would be predicted from the Solutrean hypothesis). His entire genome has been sequenced & shows that he has no ancestry from European sources. There is no conceivable scenario under which Kennewick Man could have inherited just his mitochondrial genome from Solutreans but the rest of his genome from Beringians. Thus, without additional evidence, there is nothing to justify the assumption that X2a must have evolved in Europe.

The Ice Bridge unfortunately relied on cherry-picking of data to support the ideas of Bradley & Stanford...You must build your models based on evidence you have, not evidence you wish you had, & the Solutrean hypothesis is lacking sufficient evidence to be considered seriously.

References & further reading

Raff J, & Bolnick D. (2015) Does Mitochondrial Haplogroup X Indicate Ancient Trans-Atlantic Migration to the Americas? A Critical Re-Evaluation.

O’Brien, Michael J., Matthew T. Boulanger, Mark Collard, Briggs Buchanan, Lia Tarle, Lawrence G. Straus & Metin I. Eren (2014). “On thin ice: problems with Stanford & Bradley’s proposed Solutrean colonisation of North America”. Antiquity. 88: 606–624.

Stanford, Dennis J. & Bruce Bradley (2012). Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Archaeologists Say Humans May Have Come to Texas Earlier Than Previously Thought

1590 North American Atlantic Coast Natives by John White (c1540 – c1593). The village of Pomeiooc (Pomeiock) was a Native America settlement, designated on de Bry’s map of Virginia, Americae Pars Nunc Virginia Dicta, between today’s Wyesocking Bay & Lake Landing, North Carolina. John White designates the settlement as Pomeyoo.

New evidence pushes back previous estimates of arrival by 3,000 years

Texas Standard by Kevin Wheeler
July 20, 2018 2:48 pm| 

In the 1920s, archaeologists dug up a trove of ancient artifacts near Clovis, New Mexico. What humans had known about their past was changed forever. These artifacts were the oldest man-made objects found on the Western Hemisphere, & the discovery led to a theory that the first humans to set foot in the Americas did so around about 13,000 years ago, & that they made & used tools like the ones found near Clovis.

Now a group of archaeologists from Texas State University are offering some of the most convincing evidence yet to challenge this “Clovis First” theory.  They’ve recently discovered about 150,000 artifacts near at the Gault Archaeological Site near Killeen, Texas. What they’ve found could change what we know about the timeline of human history.

Tom Williams is one of the archaeologists who has been working at Gault, & he doesn’t mince words when he talks about the significance of this research.  “It really is changing the paradigm that we currently consider for the earliest human occupation in the Americas,” Williams says.

The search for artifacts older than the Clovis ones began at the Gault site in 2007, & since then, Williams & his team have found about 150,000 technological tools that range from hide-scrapers, to blade cores, which were used to create long knives out of flint, to projectile points.

“These projectile points are particularly interesting because they don’t look like Clovis,” Williams says. “And at the moment they appear to be unique in the archaeological record in the earliest part of prehistory in North America.”

Williams conservatively estimates that these artifacts could be 16,000-20,000 years old, which would put them at about 3,000 years older than any Clovis artifact. The age of the tools found at Gault suggests that humans arrived in North America much earlier than what was previously thought. They’re utterly unique.  “Right now we find no other technology that looks like this assemblage,” Williams says.

For Williams, finds like this illuminate one of archaeology’s great appeals. “One of the things with archaeology is you never know what’s down beneath the earth,” Williams says.

Archaeology Magazine - A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America
Unique Assemblage of Stone Tools Unearthed in Texas

Texas stone tools (Produced by N. Velchoff, The Gault School of Archaeological Research) Killeen, Texas

According to a Texas Standard report, some 150,000 stone artifacts have been found at the Gault archaeological site in central Texas, in the layers below the sediments that contained Clovis artifacts. First discovered in the 1920s in Clovis, New Mexico, Clovis-style tools were thought to have been made by the earliest Americans some 13,000 years ago. The sediments surrounding the newly discovered artifacts were dated with optically simulated luminescence, which measures the amount of time that has lapsed since the sediments were last exposed to heat or sunlight. Archaeologist Tom Willliams of Texas State University said the tests suggest the projectile points in the Gault site’s lower layers are between 16,000 & 20,000 years old. “Right now we find no other technology that looks like this assemblage,” he added. The research team therefore suggests that the people who made Clovis-style tools migrated into a region that already had an established population.

A Brief Traditional View of Natives in the Early America

At the height of the Ice Age, between 34,000 & 30,000 B.C., much of the world's water was locked up in vast continental ice sheets. As a result, the Bering Sea was hundreds of meters below its current level, & a land bridge, known as Beringia, emerged between Asia & North America. At its peak, Beringia is thought to have been some 1,500 kilometers wide. A moist & treeless tundra, it was covered with grasses & plant life, attracting the large animals that early humans hunted for their survival.

The first people to reach North America almost certainly did so without knowing they had crossed into a new continent. They probably would have been following game & agreeable weather, as their ancestors had for thousands of years, possibly along the Siberian coast & then across the land bridge.  Genetics studies have shown that the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas are descended from a group that diverged from its Siberian ancestors beginning sometime around 23,000 years before present & remained isolated in Beringia (the region of land that once connected Siberia & North America) for an extended period of time. When the glaciers covering North America melted enough to make the Pacific coast navigable, southward travel became possible, & patterned genetic diversity across North & South America reflects these early movements.

Once in Alaska, it would take these first North Americans thousands of years more to work their way through the openings in great glaciers south to what is now the United States. Evidence of early life in North America continues to be found. Little of it, however, can be reliably dated before 12,000 B.C.; a recent discovery of a hunting lookout in northern Alaska, for example, may date from almost that time. So too may the finely crafted spear points & items found near Clovis, New Mexico.

Similar artifacts have been found at sites throughout North & South America, indicating that life was probably already well established in much of the Western Hemisphere by some time prior to 10,000 B.C.

Around that time the mammoth began to die out & the bison took its place as a principal source of food & hides for these early North Americans. Over time, as more & more species of large game vanished — whether from overhunting or natural causes — plants, berries, & seeds became an increasingly important part of the early American diet. Gradually, foraging & the first attempts at primitive agriculture appeared. Native Americans in what is now central Mexico led the way, cultivating corn, squash, & beans, perhaps as early as 8,000 B.C. Slowly, this knowledge spread northward.

By 3,000 B.C., a primitive type of corn was being grown in the river valleys of New Mexico & Arizona. Then the first signs of irrigation began to appear, and, by 300 B.C., signs of early village life.

By the first centuries A.D., the Hohokam were living in settlements near what is now Phoenix, Arizona, where they built ball courts & pyramid-like mounds reminiscent of those found in Mexico, as well as a canal & irrigation system.

Yaudanchi Creation Story

Tales Around the Campfire -  Robert Hood, designer, and Edward Francis Finden, engraver, Interior of a Cree Indian Tent. March 25th. 1820, 1823 

 Yaudanchi Creation Story

Everything was water except a very small piece of ground. On this were the eagle and the coyote. Then the turtle swam to them. They sent it to dive for the earth at the bottom of the water. The turtle barely succeeded in reaching the bottom and touching it with its foot. When it came up again, all the earth seemed washed out. Coyote looked closely at its nails. At last he found a grain of earth. Then he and the eagle took this and laid it down. From it they made the earth as large as it is. From the earth they also made six men and six women. They sent these out in pairs in different directions and the people separated. After a time the eagle sent the coyote to see what the people were doing. Coyote came back and said: “They are doing something bad. They are eating the earth. One side is already gone.” The eagle said: ” That is bad. Let us make something for them to eat. Let us send the dove to find something.” The dove went out. It found a single grain of meal. The eagle and coyote put this down on the ground. Then the earth became covered with seeds and fruit. Now they told the people to eat these. When the seeds were dry and ripe the people gathered them. Then the people increased and spread all over. But the water is still under the world. 

(From Cabrillo.edu and written by C. Smith)