Who were the first Americans?

[user 6507]

I’m an archeology nut, and I’ve always had problems with the concept that humans have only populated the Americas for 12,000 or 13,000 years. Recently, science has been taking a second look, and it’s cool to think we may have been here for 30,000 years. There is also the real possibility that AmerIndians may not have been the first to come over via the land bridge. Clovis is out, and the possibility of multiple migrations is in.

Who Were The First Americans? - TIME

[Daddy B]

Originally Posted by StephenB

I’m an archeology nut, and I’ve always had problems with the concept that humans have only populated the Americas for 12,000 or 13,000 years. Recently, science has been taking a second look, and it’s cool to think we may have been here for 30,000 years. There is also the real possibility that AmerIndians may not have been the first to come over via the land bridge. Clovis is out, and the possibility of multiple migrations is in.

Who Were The First Americans? - TIME

Glad to help, you nut.

[Rissask]

Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.

Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before.

Sounds like a cool book, Daddy B.

Fascinating stuff. I am an archaeology/history nut too, Stephen.

This definitely is a big difference from the commonly accepted (up 'til now) 12,000 years theory.

Where is it they think they came from, Polynesia or where?

[Daddy B]

Originally Posted by Rissask

Sounds like a cool book, Daddy B.

Fascinating stuff. I am an archaeology/history nut too, Stephen.

This definitely is a big difference from the commonly accepted (up 'til now) 12,000 years theory.

Where is it they think they came from, Polynesia or where?

Help, I'm surrounded by fruitcakes!

[Rissask]

Originally Posted by Daddy B

Help, I'm surrounded by fruitcakes!

Is it STILL raining there?

[Daddy B]

Originally Posted by Rissask

Is it STILL raining there?

No, but still wet. No tennis to help cure the hangover, courts full of puddles

[Rissask]

awww....my heart bleeds for you, living in such crappy surroundings.

wait for it

[Cosmo]

Do you mean the one's killed off by the new Americans...

[user 6507]

Originally Posted by Cosmo

Do you mean the one's killed off by the new Americans...

Wouldn't it be ironic if say Europeans were here first? Then who wiped out whom?

[Rissask]

Hmmm. That would be quite ironic!

The myth of the 'peaceful native' would be further destroyed.

This is a bit off topic, but this article is pretty interesting (more of a book review actually).

Before the White Man Came

Why then, against all the evidence, do we venerate the primitive? And to the point of pretending a bunch of torturing marauders devised the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. We do it for the same reason we indulge behaviour like that at Caledonia, Ont. We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain. The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.


It's worse than Harris thinks. We're not merely "forgetful." We've constructed a fantasy past in which primitive societies lived in peace and security with nary a fear that their crops would be stolen or their children enslaved. War has been the natural condition of mankind for thousands of years, and our civilization is a very fragile exception to that. What does it say about us that so many of our elites believe exactly the opposite -- that we are a monstrous violent rupture with our primitive pacifist ancestors? It's never a good idea to put reality up for grabs. You can bet your highest-denomination axe on that.

[kirbyfan]

Originally Posted by Cosmo

Do you mean the one's killed off by the new Americans...

I believe that Americans/people have been killing each other off for some time now....and continue to do so.

Troll post snuffed!

[Daddy B]

Originally Posted by kirbyfan

I believe that Americans/people have been killing each other off for some time now....and continue to do so.

Troll post snuffed!

That's the price you have to pay for having expensive toolboxes.

[kirbyfan]

Originally Posted by Daddy B

That's the price you have to pay for having expensive toolboxes.

Ah you confuse me with Dartay....I only kill people that come in my home, i dont count the garage. As a matter of fact, last time I looked in the garage, i would welcome some people comming by and removing multiple items ....i hate clutter!

[PlayadelSoul]

Actually, there could have been no "Americans" before the country and continents were named. They would have been called something else. The term "Native American" would mean anyone born in the US, Canada, Mexico, or south to Argentina and Chile.

[Daddy B]

Originally Posted by PlayadelSoul

Actually, there could have been no "Americans" before the country and continents were named. They would have been called something else. The term "Native American" would mean anyone born in the US, Canada, Mexico, or south to Argentina and Chile.

Geek...