Ancient humans migrate from Asia to North America.
According to archaeologists, during the ice ages, Beringia—a 60-mile land bridge between Siberia and Alaska—is periodically exposed as the formation of glaciers lowers the waters of the Bering Sea. Ancient Asian hunters following herds of mammoths, bison, and reindeer easily transverse Beringia in a series of migrations and become the first residents of the North American continent. The ancestors of modern Indians, these people head south over time, eventually populating areas throughout the Americas.
Archaeologists disagree about when the first of these migrations took place. While some hold they began as long as 40,000 years ago, most place the earliest date of human habitation in North America between 27,000 and 14,000 years ago, with the majority favoring the later dates.
Many Indians dispute the Bering Strait Theory as a whole. Although it is supported by geological and biological evidence, the theory contradicts the creation stories of many Indian tribes maintaining that the first humans were created in their homelands.
“There are immense contemporary political implications to [the Bering Strait] theory which makes it difficult for many people to surrender. Considerable residual guilt remains over the manner in which the Western Hemisphere was invaded and settled by Europeans. . . . People want to believe that the Western Hemisphere. . . was a vacant, unexploited, fertile land. . . . [and] that American Indians were not original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere but latecomers who had barely unpacked before Columbus came knocking on the door. If Indians had arrived only a few centuries earlier, they had no real claim to land that could not be swept away by European discovery.”
—Vine Deloria Jr. in Red Earth, White Lies (1995)
World History
