WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN MAN? - HISTORY - 2025

The most accepted hypothesis says that the origin of American man is in Siberia, from where he arrived on the continent, about 25,000 years ago, through the Bering Strait, which connected Asia and North America.

However, it was stopped by glaciers and had to wait a few thousand more years to be able to move south.

Although scientific evidence indicates that modern humans emerged from Africa more than 100,000 years ago, they did not reach America until less than 20,000 years ago.

Fossils of anatomically modern humans, found in Africa, date back about 200,000 years. The ancestors of Europeans, Asians, and Australians did not expand from Africa until some point 50,000 to 80,000 years ago.

However, other classes of humans may have made the journey to North America much earlier. Neanderthal ancestors existed outside of Africa thousands of years ago; some may have reached America.

While it is widely recognized that America was the last continent to be occupied by our species, the aspects of this process, the period in which it occurred, the area from which the ancestors came, and the number of migrations differ widely.

Colonization of the first humans in America

Recent research used to validate the archaeological evidence found suggests that the Paleo Indians first dispersed in America towards the end of the last ice age, around 16,500 or 13,000 years ago.

Most of the archaeological community agrees that America was colonized by migrants from Northeast Asian populations, but the chronology of migrations, routes, and the source of the populations that contributed to the migrations remain uncertain.

This uncertainty is fueled by the lack of archaeological evidence on migration routes dating back to the periods in which these migrations are supposed to have occurred.

There are currently two models of migration. The first is the short chronology theory, which indicates that the first migration occurred after the Last Glacial Maximum, which began to decline about 19,000 years ago, and was then followed by successful waves of immigrants.

The second theory is the long chronology theory, which proposes that the first group of people to enter America did so on a much longer date, possibly some 21,000 to 40,000 years ago. Much later, another wave of immigrants followed.

Possible migration routes to America

1- Inland route

Historically, theories about migration in America have centered around Beringia, through the interior of North America. The discovery of artifacts in Clovis, New Mexico, suggests a time extension of the settlement in which the glaciers were still extensive.

This led to the hypothesis of a migration route between the Laurentian Ice Sheet and the Cordillera to explain this settlement. It is believed that the first hunters who migrated out of Beringia, later dispersed throughout America; This is known as the Clovis population theory.

Among anthropologists, the source population of the migration in America is believed to have originated from an area somewhere east of the Yenisei River. The common occurrence of a haplogroup among East Asian and Native American populations has been recognized.

The highest frequency of the four haplogroups associated with Native Americans occurs in the Altai-baikal region of southern Siberia. Some subdivisions of Native Americans occur among the Mongol, Amur, Japanese, Korean, and Ainu populations.

On the other hand, the distribution and diversity of specific lineages in South America suggests that Amerindian populations were isolated after the initial colonization of their regions.

This suggests that the early migrants in the northeastern extremes of North America and Greenland were derived from populations that migrated later.

2- Pacific coastal route

The Pacific models propose that the first people to reach America did so by water, following the coast from Northeast Asia to America.

Coasts are usually productive environments, as they give humans access to a great diversity of plants and animals.

Although not exclusive to land migrations, the coastal migration theory helps explain how early settlers reached extremely distant areas from the Bering Strait region.

That includes places like Monteverde, in southern Chile; and Taima Taima, in Venezuela. Two cultural components discovered in Monteverde, near the Pacific coast in Chile, date to about 14,000 years ago.

A variant of this theory is the marine migration hypothesis, which proposes that the migrants arrived in boats and settled in coastal shelters during the thaw of the coast.

The use of ships adds a measure of flexibility to the chronology. An analysis of the plants and animals suggests that a coastal route was entirely possible.

A source population from the east coast of Asia is an important part of this marine hypothesis. The navigators of Southeast Asia (Austronesian peoples) may have been the group that reached the shores of North America earlier.

One theory suggests that the people in the boats followed the coast from the Kurile Islands to Alaska, down the coasts of North and South America to Chile.

Migration by sea may explain the fact that coastal sites in South America have been inhabited, such as the Pikimachay cave in Peru and Monteverde.

Problems of maritime theories

Although coastal migration models provide a different perspective on immigration in America, they have several problems.

The main problem is that global water levels have risen more than 120 meters since the end of the last ice age, and this has submerged the ancient shores that maritime people would have followed to America.

Finding sites associated with early coastal migrations is extremely difficult, and systematic excavation of any site found in deep water is costly and problematic.

No site has produced a consistent chronology greater than 14,500 years, but research has been limited to South America and early coastal migrations.

References

1. Settlement of the Americas. Recovered from wikipedia.org
2. Humans lived in North America 130,000 years ago, study claims (2017). Recovered from nytimes.com
3. Early human migrations. Recovered from wikipedia.org
4. Homo sapiens in the Americas. Overview of the earliest human expansion in the New World (2013). Recovered from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
5. Early modern Homo sapiens. Recovered from anthro.palomar.edu