Who Were the First Americans?
In short, the remains that came to be known as Kennewick Man were almost twice as old as the celebrated Iceman discovered in 1991 in an Alpine glacier, and among the oldest and most complete skeletons ever found in the Americas. Plenty of archaeological sites date back that far, or nearly so, but scientists have found only about 50 skeletons of such antiquity, most of them fragmentary. Any new find can thus add crucial insight into the ongoing mystery of who first colonized the New World–the last corner of the globe to be populated by humans. Kennewick Man could cast some much needed light on the murky questions of when that epochal migration took place, where the first Americans originally came from and how they got here. U.S. government researchers examined the bones, but it would take almost a decade for independent scientists to get a good look at the skeleton. Although it was found in the summer of 1996, the local Umatilla Indians and four other Columbia Basin tribes almost immed
A study of skulls excavated from the tip of Baja California in Mexico suggests that the first Americans may not have been the ancestors of today’s Amerindians, but another people who came from Southeast Asia and the southern Pacific area. The question of who colonized the Americas, and when, has long been hotly debated. Traditionally, Native Americans are believed to have descended from northeast Asia, arriving over a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska some 12,000 years ago and then migrating across North and South America.
When did modern humans colonize the Americas? From where did they come and what routes did they take? These questions have gripped scientists for decades, but until recently answers have proven difficult to find. New techniques of molecular genetic analysis, and a reinvigorated search for early archaeological sites across the western hemisphere, recently have led to some astounding results. From genetics we now know that a single population of modern humans dispersed from southern Siberia toward the Bering Land Bridge as early as ~30,000 years ago, and further dispersed from Beringia to the Americas after ~16,500 years ago. From archaeology, we know that the first Americans appeared south of the Canadian ice sheets by ~15,000 years ago, 2000 years before the emergence and spread of Clovis. The route taken by the first explorers appears to have been along the recently deglaciated north Pacific coastline. Explaining when and how early modern humans entered the New World and adapted to it
