The First Mericans

INVESTIGATION

THE FIRST MARICANS; ORIGENS AND YOUR WAY OF LIVING

At the height of the Ice Age, between 34,000 and 30,000 B.C., much of the world's water was contained in vast continental icesheets. As a result, the Bering Sea was hundreds of meters below its current level, and a land bridge, known as Beringia, emerged between Asia and North America. At its peak, Beringia is thought tohave been some 1,500 kilometers wide. A moist and treeless tundra, it was covered with grasses and plant life, attracting the large animals that early humans hunted for their survival.
The first peopleto reach North America almost certainly did so without knowing they had crossed into a new continent. They would have been following game, as their ancestors had for thousands of years, along theSiberian coast and then across the land bridge.
Once in Alaska, it would take these first North Americans thousands of years more to work their way through the openings in great glaciers south to what isnow the United States. Evidence of early life in North America continues to be found. Little of it, however, can be reliably dated before 12,000 B.C.; a recent discovery of a hunting lookout innorthern Alaska, for example, may date from almost that time. So too may the finely crafted spear points and items found near Clovis, New Mexico.
Similar artifacts have been found at sites throughoutNorth and South America, indicating that life was probably already well established in much of the Western Hemisphere by some time prior to 10,000 B.C.
Around that time the mammoth began to die out andthe bison took its place as a principal source of food and hides for these early North Americans. Over time, as more and more species of large game vanished -- whether from overhunting or naturalcauses -- plants, berries and seeds became an increasingly important part of the early American diet. Gradually, foraging and the first attempts at primitive agriculture appeared. Indians in what is now...