'Back in the good ol' days... '

I'm referring to 'the good ol' days' long before my time here on planet Earth. Days when Asians (from what is now Russia) first arrived here in what is now the USA. I promised myself I would write this piece in mid-2023. I did such a crap job I set it aside to try again another day. Maybe this is 'another day'...

Before we Euro-transplants populated these United States, Canada, Mexico and all the other countries and states we see today in the Americas - from near the North pole to near the South pole - these lands were populated by what we refer to today as indigenous peoples. And according to academics who study those theoretical populations, those early residents probably arrived from Europe and Asia thousands of years before there were calendars. I recently heard on NPR that the earliest human settlements in what is now the United States may date as far back as 40,000 YBP*... something like 42,000 years ago.

To my limited exposure to our ancient history there seems to be 2 paths to populate North and South America: 

• By foot via a land-bridge between what is now Russia and the Alaskan peninsula. Alternately...
• There is marine access using prevailing ocean winds and currents from Western Europe to Northeast shores of North America.
• An alternate path across either the central Atlantic or Pacific via watercraft is an even further journey requiring great planning, provisioning and seamanship- which all seems too advanced 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. **

An approximation of the land-bridge about 25,000 years ago between 
Russia and Alaska. The land-bridge is of course now gone

 

From my limited reading of our ancient history, apparently the 2 continents of the Americas were most likely populated by travelers coming by way of what is now Russia, then across a land-bridge between Asia and North America. And I'm not completely sure if that 'bridge' was of land or ice, but whichever the connection, it had to have been cold because of the extreme Northern latitudes. 

So I further assume the migration continued from the Northwest of what is now Alaska, down across current day Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central America and into South America. The population growth would have been slow if it was by migration alone, so I'll further conclude the migrant population grew after arriving in Northwest North America as these new arrivals settled. 

Once East and South of the Russia-Alaska land-bridge, the climate must have been conducive to settlement. Our forebears must have been made of some pretty tough stuff to make that crossing carrying enough goods to survive till they could hunt, fish, scavenge enough to sustain themselves till agrarian settlements could be created.

So indigenous peoples had settled our 2 continents, lived, propagated, fought wars, and were doing pretty good till we Europeans showed up. And it's my further understanding that 'we' were able to take over because we had weapons that go bang! instead of arrows that go zip. Mmm... and we brought diseases from our homelands for which indigenous peoples had no anti-bodies so they were infected and their tribal populations decimated.

An interesting thing to me is that we, the new arrivals, treated the peoples already occupying this land as savages because we couldn't understand them. And their values were different. It didn't help that they also lived in balance with nature by not over-harvesting the land in terms of both flora and fauna. The consumption of the invaders of animal and vegetable foods disturbed the balance as might be expected. Here's a 'for instance'...

Buffalo skulls awaiting processing at a glue factory. There must be 1,000s 
of skulls in this photo!

Simultaneously we, the uninvited guests, ignored the reality these indigenous people couldn't understand us. In typical invader-fashion we presumed that speaking louder and showing displeasure should solve all communication and consumption issues. From my limited perspective that suggests the already established indigenous may well have seen us - the late arrivals with colorless skin - as the savages. What followed in the ensuing 500 years suggests that was the case.

What the ramblings above don't address is the migratory path to the Eastern shores of North America. My high school history teachings circa mid-1950s suggested that happened via Scandinavian fishermen swept West and South in their craft because of storms or currents. And later still the Vikings exploring new lands to plunder. Both sound possible but considering the lack of stories by native Americans I suspect it just didn't happen that way in sufficient number to be materially impactful on our genetic population pre-Euro discovery. Additionally the prevailing currents swept North from the mid-Atlantic along the US and Canada shores toward the North seas. 

That from someone not qualified to address the subject. But I did anyway.

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* YBP = Years Before Present; apparently replaces the BC

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** Here's an 'oh, by the way'- there was a Scandinavian anthropologist, Thor Heyerdahl, who did a documentary movie back in 1947 about this subject. That movie considered the time after South America was settled (yes, I've watched that movie but not 'back in the day' when I was age 9). Thor Heyerdahl proffered the theory that residents of South America migrated via watercraft (log rafts? boats?) from what is now coastal Peru out into the Pacific (possibly) populating the Pacific Islands. He built a log raft using balsa logs and set sail out into the Pacific. The log raft he used to test his theory was named Kon-Tiki. This was before genetic testing so the experiment wasn't as conclusive as science would like.

Then there was the Hōkūle‘a- a double hull voyaging canoe which was built at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawai'i. Hōkūle‘a sailed South from Oahu in 1976 without electronic navigation. They used traditional Polynesian navigation which relied only on the stars and wave action. That voyage took them from Honolulu to Tahiti. That voyage was documented & filmed en-route and was released as a documentary film. 

More recently the voyage is being repeated with a replacement craft (I believe it's the 6th such vessel) adhering even more rigorously to the documented descriptions of construction and navigation. They are currently in transit on a Pacific circumnavigation:

 

 The story about the Polynesian Voyaging Society is fascinating, Here's a link...

Polynesian Voyaging Society