The First Americans
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Table of Contents
Unit Learning Targets…………………………………………………………………….. 2
World Map ……………………………………………………………………………………. 3
Time For Kids – “Early Man in America” ………………………………………….. 4
Volume 11, Number 21, March 17, 2006
“Finding the First Americans”…………………………………………………………. 6
The New York Times / May 12, 2012
“Found: Fine American Fishing Tackle, 12 Millennia Old”………………… 8
www.newscientist.com / March 3, 2011
“How the First Americans Became Indians”……………………………………... 10
A History of US: The First Americans textbook
“Native Americans of the Southwest”……………………………………………… 13
History Alive! textbook
“A Day in Cahokia - AD 1030”………………………………………………………….. 14
I Wish I’d Been There: Twenty Historians Bring to Life the Dramatic Events That Changed America
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Unit Learning Targets
N OVICE
A PPRENTICE
P RACTITIONER
M ASTER
I CAN CRITIQUE THE C LOVIS FIRST T HEORY USING EVIDENCE FROM SECONDARY
SOURCES .
o
o
o
o
o
Identify the Bering Straight on a map
Draw the migration path the First Americans took from Asia to America
Demonstrate how the Beringia Land Bridge was formed
Define artifact
Identify the difference between a Primary Source and a Secondary Source
N OVICE
A PPRENTICE
P RACTITIONER
M ASTER
I CAN MAKE COMPARISONS BETWEEN THE CULTURE OF A SOCIETY AND ITS
GEOGRAPHY .
o
o
Define culture
Define region
2
World Map
3
“Early Man in America”
4
“Early Man in America”
5
Finding the First Americans
By ANDREW CURRY
The NY Times published May 18, 2012
Uphill
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/who-arrived-in-the-americas-first.html?_r=0
WHEN and how did the first people arrive in the Americas?
For many decades, archaeologists have agreed on an explanation known as the Clovis
model. The theory holds that about 13,500 years ago, bands of big-game hunters in Asia
followed their prey across an exposed ribbon of land linking Siberia and Alaska and found
themselves on a vast, unexplored continent. The route back was later blocked by rising sea
levels that swamped the land bridge. Those pioneers were the first Americans.
The theory is based largely on the discovery in
1929 of distinctive stone tools, including
sophisticated spear points, near Clovis, N.M. The
same kinds of spear points were later identified at
sites across North America. After radiocarbon
dating was developed in 1949, scholars found that
the age of these “Clovis sites” coincided with the
appearance at the end of the last ice age of an icefree corridor of tundra leading down from what is
now Alberta and British Columbia to the American
Midwest.
Over the years, hints surfaced that people might
have been in the Americas earlier than the Clovis
sites suggest, but the evidence was never solid
enough to dislodge the consensus view. In the past
five years, however, a number of discoveries have
posed major challenges to the Clovis model. Taken
together, they are turning our understanding of
American prehistory on its head.
The first evidence to raise significant questions about the Clovis model emerged in the late
1970s, when the anthropologist Tom Dillehay came across a prehistoric campsite in
southern Chile called Monte Verde. Radiocarbon dating of the site suggested that the first
campfires were lighted there, all the way at the southern tip of South America, well before
the first Clovis tools were made. Still, Professor Dillehay’s evidence wasn’t enough to
persuade scholars to abandon the Clovis model.
But in 2008, that began to change. That year, researchers from the University of Oregon
and the University of Copenhagen recovered human DNA from coprolites — preserved
human feces — found in a dry cave in eastern Oregon. The coprolites had been deposited
14,000 years ago, suggesting that Professor Dillehay and others may have been right to
place humans in the Americas before the Clovis people.
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This discovery inspired other scholars to re-examine old finds with new techniques. In the
1970s, for instance, a farmer in Washington State found a mastodon rib with a bone shard
lodged in it, as if the mastodon had been killed with a weapon. Since the mastodon remains
predated the earliest Clovis sites by eight centuries, the nature of the finding was initially
disputed. But in 2011, researchers led by the Texas A&M archaeologist Michael R. Waters
announced that by analyzing the rib and the embedded fragment using scanning and
modeling techniques, they had confirmed that the embedded bone was a spear point —
strongly suggesting that humans in the Americas were hunting the animals with bonetipped spears long before the end of the ice age.
The Clovis model suffered yet another blow last year when Professor Waters announced
finding dozens of stone tools along a Texas creekbed. After using a technique that
measures the last time the dirt around the stones was exposed to light, Professor Waters
concluded, in a paper in Science, that the site was at least 15,000 years old — which would
make it the earliest reliably dated site in the Americas.
The archaeological evidence challenging the Clovis model is also receiving support from
genetic studies. Having compared the DNA of modern American Indians with that of
groups living in Asia today, scholars
have estimated that the last common
ancestor of the two peoples probably
lived between 16,000 and 20,000
years ago. That figure doesn’t square
with the arrival of the Clovis people
from Asia only 13,500 years ago.
Where does this leave us? We now
know people were in the Americas
earlier than 14,000 years ago. But how
much earlier, and how did they get to a
continent sealed off by thick sheets of
ice?
Working theories vary. Some scholars
hypothesize that people migrated from
Asia down the west coast of North
America in boats. Others suggest
variations on the overland route. One
theory even argues that some early Americans might have come by boat from Europe via
the North Atlantic, despite the fact that the DNA of modern American Indians does not
suggest European origins.
After 80 years under Clovis’s spell, scholars are once again venturing into unknown
territory — and no one is ready to rule anything out yet.
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Found: Fine American Fishing Tackle, 12 Millennia Old
March 03, 2011 by Ferris Jabr
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20195-found-fine-american-fishingtackle-12-millennia-old.html?full=true&print=true
Mountainous
A treasure trove of finely crafted fishing spearheads from 12,000 years ago has been
discovered on the Channel Islands of California. They are a clue to the lifestyles of
some of the earliest American settlers, and suggest that two separate cultures lived
in North America at the time: one, the well-known Clovis culture, lived inland and
feasted
on
mammoths,
mastodons
and
other
mammals; the other was a
coastal culture with a taste for
seafood.
The archaeologists who made
the find believe that the two
groups were distinct, but
shared trade links.
Jon
Erlandson
of
the
University of Oregon in
Eugene and his team poked
around caves, springs and
likely sites of ancient human
settlement on the islands of
Santa Rosa and San Miguel,
and found more than 50 shell middens – large trash heaps of discarded seashells,
chipped stone tools and animal bones – which they dated to between 10,000 and
12,000 years ago.
They think that during this period early Americans used the islands for seasonal
hunting camps, most likely in the winter when fresh water would have been
plentiful. The remains suggest that early colonisers hunted birds such as
overwintering Canada geese, snow geese, albatross and cormorants – and possibly
marine mammals like otters and seals – but also harvested a variety of shellfish
from kelp forests, including mussels, red abalone and crabs.
Such a diet contrasts with the big-game hunters who lived on the mainland at the
time and liked to chase camels, horses and mastodons.
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Delicate work
But what astonished Erlandson and his colleagues were the tools they found near
the middens.
Team member Todd Braje of Humboldt State University in Arcata, California,
describes finely crafted barbed spearheads. "We found very thin, expertly made
projectile points and it blew us away that these delicate flint-knapped points are
this old," he says. Such tools are generally only found at more recent sites.
These fine, barbed points are markedly different from those previously found at
Clovis sites, which tend to be simple, fluted points. This hints at the coexistence of
two separate groups of people in North America at the time.
However, Loren Davis of Oregon State University in Corvallis points out that the
team also found Clovis-like spearheads on the islands: he says that tools he has dug
up on the North American mainland look nearly identical to some of the ones
Erlandson and his team found.
"That means peoples on the Channel Islands and people in western Idaho, for
example, were at one point exposed to the same ideas about how to make
technology," Davis says. A likely explanation is that the two groups shared some
kind of trade.
By land or sea?
That Erlandson and his teams found the remains on what was once a single island
off the coast of modern-day California is also significant. There are many hypotheses
for how humans colonised North America: one popular scenario is that they crossed
over from Asia across a land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska.
But some historians believe at least some of the early settlers were seafarers, and
either dropped down along the coast from Alaska or even crossed over from Japan.
Erlandson and his colleagues say their new finds support the idea that the first
people to inhabit the Americas were mariners, or perhaps that land and sea-based
migrations occurred in tandem.
It's too early to say for sure. Davis points out – and Braje concedes – that the
Channel Island sites are not the oldest in the Americas, so they do not tell us about
the very first pioneers. Still, Braje says, "this pushes back the chronology of New
World seafaring to 12,000, maybe 13,000 years ago. It gets us a big step closer to
showing that a coastal migration route happened, or was at least possible."
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How the First Americans Became Indians
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How the First Americans Became Indians
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How the First Americans Became Indians
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Native American Cultural Regions
13
A Day in Cahokia - AD 1030
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A Day in Cahokia - AD 1030
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A Day in Cahokia - AD 1030
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A Day in Cahokia - AD 1030
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A Day in Cahokia - AD 1030
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A Day in Cahokia - AD 1030
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A Day in Cahokia - AD 1030
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A Day in Cahokia - AD 1030
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