Twenty thousand years ago, ice sheets, some a mile thick, extended across North America as far south as modern-day Illinois.
The last global ice age trapped much of the world’s water in enormous continental glaciers. Studying artifacts, bones, and genetic signatures, these scholars have pieced together a narrative that claims that the Americas were once a “new world” for Native Americans as well. 3 America’s Indigenous peoples have passed down many accounts of their origins, written and oral, which share creation and migration histories.Īrchaeologists and anthropologists, meanwhile, focus on migration histories.
2 Nahua people trace their beginnings to the place of the Seven Caves, from which their ancestors emerged before they migrated to what is now central Mexico. A Choctaw tradition locates southeastern peoples’ beginnings inside the great Mother Mound earthwork, Nunih Waya, in the lower Mississippi Valley. 1 According to a Lenape tradition, the earth was made when Sky Woman fell into a watery world and, with the help of muskrat and beaver, landed safely on a turtle’s back, thus creating Turtle Island, or North America. The Salinan people of present-day California, for example, tell of a bald eagle that formed the first man out of clay and the first woman out of a feather. But where do their stories start? Native Americans passed stories down through the millennia that tell of their creation and reveal the contours of Indigenous belief. It began one of the most consequential developments in all of human history and the first chapter in the long American yawp.Īmerican history begins with the first Americans. But the arrival of Europeans and the resulting global exchange of people, animals, plants, and microbes-what scholars benignly call the Columbian Exchange-bridged more than ten thousand years of geographic separation, inaugurated centuries of violence, unleashed the greatest biological terror the world had ever seen, and revolutionized the history of the world.
Kinship ties knit their communities together. They cultivated distinct art forms and spiritual values. Native Americans built settled communities and followed seasonal migration patterns, maintained peace through alliances and warred with their neighbors, and developed self-sufficient economies and maintained vast trade networks.
Dynamic and diverse, they spoke hundreds of languages and created thousands of distinct cultures. Humans have lived in the Americas for over ten thousand years. Europeans called the Americas “the New World.” But for the millions of Native Americans they encountered, it was anything but.
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