Peopling of the Americas

When early European explorers first described the natives of the Americas, they fired the imagination of the public in Europe. Thinkers were fascinated by how the customs of peoples in the "New World" differed from European ways of life and from the lifestyles of other newly contacted peoples in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. People wanted to know how Native Americans were related to the rest of the human species. To answer this question, knowing how they came to the Americas was necessary. This problem has continued to fascinate scientists and the public until the present. Nobody knows exactly when people first arrived in the Americas or the specific route they took to get there. The first arrival happened so long ago that it is a great challenge to piece together the clues that would solve the puzzle.

To understand the peopling of the Americas, scientists must use evidence from many disciplines: archaeology, geology, climatology, linguistics, physical anthropology, biology, and genetics. Sometimes the evidence from one field contradicts that in another field. At other times crucial evidence is missing from one field. In spite of these problems scientists have managed to construct several believable models of how the New World was originally settled. Future research may show that one model fits the facts better than all the others, or it might force us to create new models. Most American tribes have stories that tell how they were created. Many tribes tell of arriving in what would become their homelands after emerging from beneath the earth. The Yaruro of Venezuela relates how people originally lived under the earth. The snake Kuma threw a thin rope down a hole in the earth, and men and women started to climb out.

Unfortunately, only a few people came out before the rope broke under the weight of a pregnant woman. This is the reason there are so few Yaruro people. Other stories tell of North America being created as an island, "Turtle Island," by birds diving in the ocean for mud that they built into land by putting the mud on a turtle's back. Some tribes have migration stories that tell of long journeys that took place in the far distant past.

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