They Were Here First!

I've been thinking about the Native Americans lately. I like to call them "First Americans" since they appear to have arrived a bit over 13,000 years ago from Asia. There's a couple of theories about that migration: one says they came from northern Asia via a "land bridge" into what is now Alaska and North America and then eventually into Central and South America, another suggests they reached South America from the Southeast Asian region and many migrated northward into Central America eventually while the North American tribes were made up of the descendants of those who used the land bridge. Essentially, we don't really know their origins.

We do know that their downfall began with the arrival of the Europeans because they appeared to be thriving until then. The largest and most advanced tribes seemed to have been in South and Central America and who built great cities. These were not what we think of when talking about the American Indian. We mostly conjure up images of the tribes of North America where great civilizations didn't evolve.

Contrary to the typical folklore, these North American tribes were not peaceful, attuned to nature, peoples. They warred among themselves and some even took slaves as they massacred their rivals, much as the Europeans did in the Old World. We used their animosties and rivalry against them, something I think we learned to do over centuries as we divided Europe into regions that eventually became countries (or split into them).

The migration theories are based on the concept, I believe, that man first evolved in Africa, migrating out into a vast unpopulated world. That's as good a theory as any I have heard and DNA studies seem to bear it out. We had rivals, called Neanderthals, whom we eventually displaced and they became extinct.

That makes me wonder if there hadn't been a truly indigenous species on the American continents that the Asian emigres displaced. So far, we have found no trace of such a people.

We do know that the peoples of the Americas were primitive, not having advanced beyond the level of our Stone Age. This left them vulnerable to the advanced technology of the Europeans.