Native Americans
Academics generally believe that humans reached North America south of the Laurentide Ice Sheet at some point between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago. Some archaeological evidence suggests the possibility that human arrival in the Americas may have occurred prior to the Last Glacial Maximum more than 20,000 years ago.
When
did humans migrate to the Americas?
approximately 13,000 to 13,500 years ago
In the 1970s, college students in archaeology such as myself learned that the
first human beings to arrive in North America had come over a land bridge from
Asia and Siberia approximately 13,000 to 13,500 years ago. These people, the
first North Americans, were known collectively as Clovis people.
So where did the first humans enter the Americas? The currently favored theory is that humans migrated via the Bering land bridge along the western Pacific coastline at a time when sea levels were lower, exposing an ice-free coastline for travel with the possibility for transport over water.
Thousands of years before Europeans began crossing the vast Atlantic by ship and settling en masse, the first immigrants arrived in North America from Asia. They were Native American ancestors who crossed a narrow spit of land connecting Asia to North America at least 20,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age.Dec 21, 2018
What
groups of people migrated to the Americas involuntarily?
While European immigrants were coming to America to escape political or
religious persecution or to pursue a dream of economic security, Africans came
involuntarily and were exploited to produce prosperity for others.
How did Africans get to America?
Africans
came to the New World in the earliest days of the Age of Exploration. In the
early 1500s, Africans trekked across the many lands in North, Central, and
South America that were claimed by Spain, some coming in freedom and some in
slavery, working as soldiers, interpreters, or servants.
While we commend Christopher Columbus (or should we say, Cristobal Colon) for sailing the seas in search of new land on Europe's behalf, he was not the first to make that journey. In fact, widely untaught evidence exists that Africans sailed to the Americas and settled centuries before Columbus.
According to an American historian and linguist Leo Weiner of Harvard
University, one of the strongest pieces of evidence to support the fact that
Africans sailed to America before Christopher Columbus was a journal entry from
Columbus himself.
In Weiner’s book, “Africa and the Discovery of America,” he explains that
Columbus noted in his journal that the Native Americans confirmed “black
skinned people had come from the south-east in boats, trading in gold-tipped
spears.” It was found also that the ratio of properties of gold, copper, and
silver alloy were identical to the spears then being forged in African Guinea.
Enormous Olmec head statues with African facial characteristics found
throughout Central and South America support that Africans had settled in
America long before its apparent “discovery.” Ranging up to 11.15 feet in
height and weighing 30 to 40 tons, these statues generally depict helmeted
black men with large eyes, broad fleshy noses and full lips.
The first of these heads was discovered by explorer Jose Melgar in Veracruz in
1862. Melgar wrote that “what astonished me was the Ethiopic type which it
represents. I reflected that there had undoubtedly been blacks in this
country.” The headpiece worn on these Olmec sculptures is related to a type of
war helmet identified as connecting them to Egyptian region Nubians.
In truth, Africans began coming to the Americas thousands of years before
Columbus; and the evidence of their presence, though systematically ignored by
mainstream and K-12 education curriculum, is overwhelming and undeniable.
Even early Mexican scholars were convinced that the impact of the black
explorers on the New World was profound and enduring. One author, J.A.
Villacorta, has written: “Any way you view it, Mexican civilization had its
origin in Africa.” Indian scholar, Rafique Jairazbhoy appears to have been
right when he wrote: “The black began his career in America not as slave but as
master.”
It’s about time that America realizes that fact also.
DeWayne Johnson (dewayne.johnson@iamabridgebuilder.us)
is co-founder and executive consultant at BridgeBuilder Education &
Investments, LLC.
How did Indians get to America?
Scientists have found that Native American populations - from Canada to the
southern tip of Chile - arose from at least three migrations, with the majority
descended entirely from a single group of First American migrants that crossed
over through Beringia, a land bridge between Asia and America that existed
during the ...Jul 12, 2012
African Americans: Forced and Voluntary Immigrants Who Helped Shape America
We
offer two historical perspectives on the African American experience. The first
emphasizes the economic and cultural impact of Africans and their descendants
in the United States. The second places Africans within the context of the
immigrant experience, pointing out that African immigrants have been as
ambitious and creative as any others and that their desire to live the American
dream remains undiminished.
First: Different forces prompted immigration to the United States for each
ethnic group. For the ancestors of most African Americans, the need for workers
on plantations drove the immigration process. For nearly four centuries,
European slave ships transported captive Africans from their homelands to the
Americas. These Africans came to a land of bondage and faced a severe test of
their powers of endurance. Among African Americans, the search for freedom in
America has continued for generations.
Africans made up a substantial percentage of the population of British colonial
America and then the United States. In 1790 the first census revealed that
African Americans made up more than 19 percent of the non-Indian population.
The southern states, where the economy relied on enslaved laborers, had African
majorities in many areas. For several decades captive Africans continued to
arrive on slave ships to be sold to plantation owners or local slave merchants
in such cities as Baltimore, Charleston and New Orleans.
While European immigrants were coming to America to escape political or
religious persecution or to pursue a dream of economic security, Africans came
involuntarily and were exploited to produce prosperity for others.
Second: Conventional wisdom encourages the belief that people of African
descent came to the United States as latecomers, with the only early immigrants
arriving as enslaved people and becoming, through acquired status and
conditioning, a confined, secluded, homogeneous and subordinate group in
society. Yet so much of this conventional thinking is untested and perhaps
untrue.
Myths, mistakes or misunderstandings, the misconceptions nevertheless play a
crucial role in shaping the images held about African Americans and the way
they are regarded and treated in everyday life as well as in popular history.
One such image ignores the fact that some came to this country knowingly,
sometimes more willingly than others, in hopes of bettering their personal,
political or socioeconomic condition. Despite their fears as people of color,
they came from distant homelands, attracted to the unlimited possibilities
promised in the lore of the American way of life. (Text and photographs from
the Americans All Classroom Resources.)
Native American populations descend from three
key migrations
12 July
2012
Scientists have found that Native American populations - from Canada to the southern tip of Chile - arose from at least three migrations, with the majority descended entirely from a single group of First American migrants that crossed over through Beringia, a land bridge between Asia and America that existed during the ice ages, more than 15,000 years ago.
By
studying variations in Native American DNA sequences, the international team
found that while most of the Native American populations arose from the first
migration, two subsequent migrations also made important genetic contributions.
The paper is published in the journal Nature today.
"For years it has been contentious whether the settlement of the Americas
occurred by means of a single or multiple migrations from Siberia," said
Professor Andres Ruiz-Linares (UCL Genetics, Evolution and Environment), who
coordinated the study. "But our research settles this debate: Native
Americans do not stem from a single migration. Our study also begins to cast
light on patterns of human dispersal within the Americas."
In the most comprehensive survey of genetic diversity in Native Americans so
far, the team took data from 52 Native American and 17 Siberian groups,
studying more than 300,000 specific DNA sequence variations called Single
Nucleotide Polymorphisms to examine patterns of genetic similarities and
differences between the population groups.
The study of Native American populations is technically very challenging
because of the widespread occurrence of European and African mixture in Native
American groups
Professor Andres Ruiz-Linares
The second and third migrations have left an impact only in Arctic populations
that speak Eskimo-Aleut languages and in the Canadian Chipewyan who speak a
Na-Dene language. However, even these populations have inherited most of their
genome from the First American migration. Eskimo-Aleut speakers derive more
than 50% of their DNA from First Americans, and the Chipewyan around 90%. This
reflects the fact that these two later streams of Asian migration mixed with
the First Americans they encountered after they arrived in North America.
"There are at least three deep lineages in Native American
populations," said co-author David Reich, Professor of genetics at Harvard
Medical School. "The Asian lineage leading to First Americans is the most
anciently diverged, whereas the Asian lineages that contributed some of the DNA
to Eskimo-Aleut speakers and the Na-Dene-speaking Chipewyan from Canada are
more closely related to present-day East Asian populations."
The team also found that once in the Americas, people expanded southward along
a route that hugged the coast with populations splitting off along the way.
After divergence, there was little gene flow among Native American groups,
especially in South America.
Two striking exceptions to this simple dispersal were also discovered. First,
Central American Chibchan-speakers have ancestry from both North and
South America, reflecting back-migration from South Americaand mixture of two
widely separated strands of Native ancestry. Second, the Naukan and coastal
Chukchi from north-eastern Siberia carry 'First American' DNA. Thus,
Eskimo-Aleut speakers migrated back to Asia, bringing Native American genes.
The team's analysis was complicated by the influx into the hemisphere of
European and African immigrants since 1492 and the 500 years of genetic mixing
that followed. To address this, the authors developed methods that allowed them
to focus on the sections of peoples' genomes that were of entirely Native
American origin.
"The study of Native American populations is technically very challenging
because of the widespread occurrence of European and African mixture in Native
American groups," said Professor Ruiz-Linares.
"We developed a method to peel back this mixture to learn about the
relationships among Native Americans before Europeans and Africans
arrived," Professor Reich said, "allowing us to study the history of
many more Native American populations than we could have done otherwise."
The assembly of DNA samples from such a diverse range of populations was
only possible through a collaboration of an international team of 64
researchers from the Americas (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Russia and the USA), Europe
(England, France, Spain and Switzerland) and Russia.
Ancient Genome Suggests Native Americans Really Did Descend from the First Americans
The new analysis of "Clovis boy" DNA also stirs an ethics debate about the handling of tribal remains
By Ewen Callaway, Nature magazine on February 12, 2014
The
remains of a young boy, ceremonially buried some 12,600 years ago in Montana,
have revealed the ancestry of one of the earliest populations in the Americas,
known as the Clovis culture.
Published in this issue of Nature, the boy’s genome sequence shows that today’s
indigenous groups spanning North and South America are all descended from a
single population that trekked across the Bering land bridge from Asia (M.
Rasmussen et al. Nature 506, 225–229; 2014). The analysis also points to an
early split between the ancestors of the Clovis people and a second group,
whose DNA lives on in populations in Canada and Greenland (see page 162).
But the research underscores the ethical minefield of studying ancient Native
American remains, and rekindles memories of a bruising legal fight over a
different human skeleton in the 1990s.
To
avoid such a controversy, Eske Willerslev, a paleobiologist at the University
of Copenhagen who led the latest study, attempted to involve Native American
communities. And so he embarked on a tour of Montana’s Indian reservations last
year, talking to community members to explain his work and seek their support.
“I didn’t want a situation where the first time they heard about this study was
when it’s published,” he says.
Construction workers discovered the Clovis burial site on a private ranch near
the small town of Wilsall in May 1968 (see ‘Ancient origins’). About 100 stone
and bone artefacts, as well as bone fragments from a male child aged under two,
were subsequently recovered.
The boy’s bones were found to date to the end of the Clovis culture, which
flourished in the central and western United States between about 13,000 and
12,600 years ago. Carved elk bones found with the boy’s remains were hundreds
of years older, suggesting that they were heirlooms. The ranch, owned by Melvyn
and Helen Anzick, is the only site yet discovered at which Clovis objects exist
alongside human bones. Most of the artefacts now reside in a museum, but
researchers returned the human remains to the Anzick family in the late 1990s.
At that time, the Anzicks’ daughter, Sarah, was conducting cancer and genome
research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and
thought about sequencing genetic material from the bones. But she was wary of
stoking a similar debate to the one surrounding Kennewick Man, a human skeleton
found on the banks of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, in July
1996. Its discovery sparked an eight-year legal battle between Native American
tribes, who claimed that they were culturally connected to the individual, and
researchers, who said that the roughly 9,000-year-old remains pre-dated the
tribes.
The US government sided with the tribes, citing the federal Native American
Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The act requires that human
remains discovered on federal lands — as Kennewick Man was — are returned to
affiliated tribes for reburial. But a court ruled that the law did not apply,
largely because of the age of the remains, and ordered that Kennewick Man be
stored away from public view in a museum.
Sarah
Anzick sought the advice of local tribes over the Clovis boy, but she could not
reach a consensus with the tribes on what to do. She gave up on the idea,
stored the bones in a safe location and got on with her other research.
In 2009, archaeologist Michael Waters, of Texas A&M University in College
Station, contacted Anzick with the idea of sending the remains to Willerslev’s
lab. (In early 2010, the lab published one of the first genome sequences of an
ancient human, a 4,000-year-old resident of Greenland; see M. Rasmussen et al.
Nature 463, 757–762; 2010.) “I said, ‘I will allow you guys to do this, but I
want to be involved,’” recalls Anzick, who has published more than a dozen papers
in leading journals.
In Copenhagen, she extracted DNA from fragments of the boy’s skull ready for
mitochondrial genome sequencing, which offers a snapshot of a person’s maternal
ancestry. Back in Montana months later, she received the sequencing data and
discovered that the genome’s closest match was to present-day Native Americans.
“My heart just stopped,” she says.
Right to remains
After Willerslev’s team confirmed the link by sequencing the boy’s nuclear
genome (a more detailed indicator of ancestry), Willerslev sought advice from
an agency that handles reburial issues. He was told that, because the remains
were found on private land, NAGPRA did not apply and no consultation was
needed. Despite this, Willerslev made his own attempt to consult local tribes.
This led to a meeting in September at the burial site, with Anzick, Willerslev
and their co-author Shane Doyle, who works in Native American studies at
Montana State University in Bozeman, and is a member of the Crow tribe.
“That place is very special to me, that’s my ancestral homeland,” says Doyle.
He told Willerslev and Anzick that they should rebury the child where he was
found. “I think you need to put the little boy back where his parents left
him,” Doyle recalls telling them.
Doyle
and Willerslev then set off on a 1,500-kilometer road trip to meet
representatives of four Montana tribes; Doyle later consulted another five.
Many of the people they talked to had few problems with the research, Doyle
says, but some would have preferred to have been consulted before the study
started, and not years after.
Willerslev says that researchers studying early American remains should assume
that they are related to contemporary groups, and involve them as early as
possible. But it is not always clear whom to contact, he adds, particularly
when remains are related to groups spread across the Americas. “We have to
engage with Native Americans, but how you deal with that question in practice
is not an easy thing,” he says.
Hank Greeley, a legal scholar at Stanford University in California who is
interested in the legal and ethical issues of human genetics, commends the
approach of Willerslev’s team. But he says that there is no single solution to
involving Native American communities in such research. “You’re looking to try
to talk to the people who might be most invested in, or connected with,
particular sets of remains,” he advises.
Dennis O’Rourke, a geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who
studies ancient DNA from populations native to the islands around Alaska, notes
that indigenous groups have varying concerns: some want remains reburied,
others do not, for instance.
The Montana tribes overwhelmingly wanted the Clovis boy’s bones interred. Plans
for a reburial ceremony, possibly at an undisclosed site, are now being hashed
out, with the Crow Nation playing a lead role. It is expected to take place in
the spring, after the ground thaws.
This article is reproduced in Scientific American with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on February 12, 2014.
