La Segunda Guerra Mundial

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Student’s name: Oscar Eduardo Rivas Ayala
Jasmin Lisbeth Reyes Alvarado
Bethzabe Eunice Ramos Sánchez
Wendy Leonor Aguilar Flores


AMERICAN CULTURE

SECTION: 01

LIC. LUIS HORALDO ROMERO
Who Were The First Americans?

A study of skulls excavatedfrom 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 landbridge between Siberia and Alaska some 12,000 years ago and then migrating across North and South America.
But recent research, including the Baja California study, indicates that the initial settlement of the continent was instead driven by Southeast Asians who occupied Australia 60,000 years ago and then expanded into the Americas about 13,500 years ago, prior to Mongoloid people arriving fromnortheast Asia.
The skulls from Baja California, which may date back only a few hundred years, have slender-looking faces that are different from the broad-cheeked craniums of modern Amerindians, the descendants of the Mongoloid people.
"Our results change the traditional idea that all modern Amerindians present morphological affinities with East Asians as a result of a single migration," saidRolando Gonzalez José of the University Of Barcelona, Spain, who led the study. "The settlement of the New World is better explained by considering a continuous influx of people from Asia."
Challenging Clovis
Conventional wisdom says that Native Americans descended from prehistoric hunters who walked from northeast Asia across a land bridge, formed at the end of the Ice Age, to Alaska some12,000 years ago. American Indians resemble the people of Mongolia, China and Siberia.
In the 1930s, archeologists found stone spear points among the bones of mammoths near Clovis, New Mexico. Radio carbon dating in the 1950s showed that the oldest site was 11,400 years old. The sites were assumed, for years, to be the first evidence of human occupation in the Americas.
Kennewick Man
The identityof the first Americans is an emotive issue for American Indians, who believe their ancestors were the first to inhabit the Americas. Controversy erupted after skeletal remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996. This skeleton, estimated to be 9,000 years old, had a long cranium and narrow face features typical of people from Europe, the Near East or India rather than the widecheekbones and rounder skull of an American Indian.













“Recent data based on archeological evidence and environmental records suggest that humans entered the Americas from Bering as early as 15,000 years ago, and the dispersal occurred along the deglaciated Pacific coastline," said Antonio Torroni of University di Pavia, Italy. "Our study now reveals a novel alternative scenario:Two almost concomitant paths of migration, both from Bering about 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, led to the dispersal of Paleo-Indians the first Americans."
Such a dual origin for Paleo-Indians has major implications for all disciplines involved in Native American studies, he said. For instance, it implies that there is no compelling reason to presume that a single language family was carried alongwith the first migrants.
When Columbus reached the Americas in 1492, Native American occupation stretched from the Bering Strait to Tierra del Fuego, Torroni explained. Those native populations encompassed extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, which has fueled extensive debate among experts over their interrelationships and origins.
The evidence that separate groups of people with...