Palaeo-Indians

Palaeo-Indian skull on left, a Native American skull on right. Both are from Texas but some 11,000 years apart in time.

Palaeo-Indians (fl. -13,000 to -10,000), also called Paleo-Americans, discovered America. According to Western science they were in Oregon by -12,350 and Chile by -12,250. That was well before Columbus, who arrived in the Bahamas in +1492.

Follow the mammoths: Before 1997 scientists believed that people first arrived in America in the -11,000s when an all-land, ice-free corridor opened up between Siberia and the heart of North America. It was towards the end of the last ice age, a time when sea levels were still low enough that the shallow Bering Sea was Beringia, a land bridge between Alaska and Siberia, and when Canada was no longer a solid sheet of ice. Presumably big-game hunters in Siberia followed the mammoths into North America.

North America circa -11,000. Notice the ice-free corridor coming through western Canada. The yellow dots are Clovis sites (see below). (From linnbenton.edu)

Clovis technology: In the -10,000s there were spear points from coast to coast in North America, all done in the same style, called Clovis spear points (pictured). This was when mammoth hunting was at its height. And when mammoths were dying out, along with horses and camels, whether from over-hunting, climate change, or the spread of trees as the ice age ended.

The Anzick child lived in Montana during this time, in about -10,600. In +2014 he became the earliest-living American to have his whole genome read. It showed that his people did in fact come from Asia, as suspected, and in time became present-day Native Americans. That last part is important because some Palaeo-Indian skulls do not look particularly Native American (pictured at top). Some even seem Australian, African or European.

1997: In 1997 scientists discovered that there were people living in Monte Verde, Chile by -12,250. That was back when Canada was still a solid sheet of ice! In the -12,000s, as it turned out, there were Palaeo-Indians all along the Pacific and Atlantic coast and as far inland as Wisconsin. They may have been living in Texas as early as -13,500.

Follow the seals: It is unclear why the Palaeo-Indians needed to be coddled with a land bridge. After all, there were already people in Australia and they did not need one. By -23,000 there were people in Japan with boats. Along the Pacific coast, from Japan all the way to Chile, the kelp highway had more than enough fish, seals and habitable coastline for humans to spread into the Americas. No land bridge or parting of the glaciers were required.

Follow the genes: According to mitochondrial DNA, which is passed only through the mother, there are five haplogroups of present-day Native Americans: A, B, C, D, and X. With mitochondrial DNA you can see how humans have moved through time and space:

• By -18,000 A, C, D had left the part of Siberia just north of Mongolia. They fit the mammoth hunters of the -11,000s. The Anzick child was a D.
• By -13,000 B had left the coast of China and South East Asia. They fit the seal hunters of the -12,000s.
• By -8,000 X had left western Eurasia.

Haplogroup X may have crossed the Atlantic – the Solutrean hypothesis – but more likely they travelled east across northern Eurasia.

Coming to America – possible routes at the end of the last ice age.

The strange distribution of Haplogroup X. Makes you almost believe in Atlantis!

– Abagond, 2018.

Sources: Mainly Google Images; “Tracking the First Americans” by Glenn Hodges in National Geographic (January 2015); “Mapping Human History” (2002) by Steve Olson. 

See also:

• human migrations: the last 100,000 years
  • Negritos
• Native Americans
  • maize
  • Meso-America
  • Mound Builders
• Abubakari II
• Basque whalers – follow the whales
• Columbus
  • Guanahani – where he set foot in America
• mitochondrial DNA
  • Mitochondrial Eve
  • Mitochondrial Helena – lived in the south of France in -18,000
  • Mitochondrial Xena

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