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Americans get a
day off work on October 10 to celebrate Columbus Day. It's an annual holiday
that commemorates the day on October 12, 1492, when the Italian explorer
Christopher Columbus officially set foot in the Americas, and claimed the land
for Spain. It has been a national holiday in the United States since 1937.
It is commonly
said that "Columbus discovered America." It would be more accurate,
perhaps, to say that he introduced the Americas to Western Europe during his
four voyages to the region between 1492 and 1502. It's also safe to say that he
paved the way for the massive influx of western Europeans that would ultimately
form several new nations including the United States, Canada and Mexico.
But to say he
"discovered" America is a bit of a misnomer because there were plenty
of people already here when he arrived.
And before
Columbus?
So who were the
people who really deserve to be called the first Americans? VOA asked Michael
Bawaya, the editor of the magazine American Archaeology. He told VOA that they
came here from Asia probably "no later than about 15,000 years ago."
They walked
across the Bering land bridge that back in the day connected what is now the
U.S. state of Alaska and Siberia. Fifteen-thousand years ago, ocean levels were
much lower and the land between the continents was hundreds of kilometers wide.
The area would
have looked much like the land on Alaska's Seward Peninsula does today:
treeless, arid tundra. But despite its relative inhospitality, life abounded
there.
According to the
U.S. National Park Service, "the land bridge played a vital role in the
spread of plant and animal life between the continents. Many species of animals
- the woolly mammoth, mastodon, scimitar cat, Arctic camel, brown bear, moose,
muskox, and horse — to name a few — moved from one continent to the other
across the Bering land bridge. Birds, fish, and marine mammals established
migration patterns that continue to this day."
And
archaeologists say that humans followed, in a never-ending hunt for food, water
and shelter. Once here, humans dispersed all across North and eventually
Central and South America.
Up until the
1970s, these first Americans had a name: the Clovis peoples. They get their
name from an ancient settlement discovered near Clovis, New Mexico, dated to
over 11,000 years ago. And DNA suggests they are the direct ancestors of nearly
80 percent of all indigenous people in the Americas.
But there's
more. Today, it's widely believed that before the Clovis people, there were
others, and as Bawaya says, "they haven't really been identified."
But there are remants of them in places as far-flung as the U.S. states of
Texas and Virginia, and as far south as Peru and Chile. We call them, for lack
of a better name, the Pre-Clovis people.
And to make
things more complicated, recent discoveries are threatening to push back the
arrival of humans in North America even further back in time. Perhaps as far
back as 20,000 years or more. But the science on this is far from settled.
Back to the
Europeans
So for now, the
Clovis and the Pre-Clovis peoples, long disappeared but still existent in the
genetic code of nearly all native Americans, deserve the credit for discovering
America. But those people arrived on the
western coast. What about arrivals from the east? Was Columbus the first
European to glimpse the untamed, verdant paradise that America must have been
centuries ago?
There is proof
that Europeans visited what is now Canada about 500 years before Columbus set
sail. They were Vikings, and evidence of their presence can be found on the
Canadian island of Newfoundland at a place called l'Anse Aux Meadows. It is now
a UNESCO World Heritage site and consists of the remains of eight buildings
that were likely wooden structures covered with grass and soil.
Today the area
is barren, but a thousand years ago there were trees everywhere and the area
likely was used as winter stopover point, where Vikings repaired their boats
and sat out bad weather. It's not quite clear if the area was a permanent
settlement, but it is clear that the expansion-minded Norsemen were here long before
Columbus.
One final
mystery
And to add one
fascinating wrinkle to the story of America's discover, consider the Sweet
Potato. Yes, that's right the sweet potato. This humble pinkish-red tuber is
native to South America. And yet, there have been sweet potatoes on the menu in
Polynesia as far back as 1,000 years ago. So how did it get there?
By comparing the
DNA of Polynesian and South American sweet potatoes, scientists think it's
clear that someone either brought them back to Polynesia after visiting South
America, or islanders brought them from South America when they were exploring
the Pacific Ocean. Either way, it suggests that about the same time Nordic
sailors were cutting trees in Canada, someone in Polynesia was trying sweet
potatoes from South America for the first time.
Speaking of
genetics, a 2014 study of the DNA of natives on the Polynesian island of Rapa
Nui, also known as Easter Island, found a fair amount of Native American genes
in the mix. The entry of American DNA into the genetics of the Rapa Nui natives
suggests that the two peoples were living together around 1280 AD.
There are other
theories out there. A retired British Naval officer named Gavin Menzies has
been pushing the idea that the Chinese colonized South America in 1421. Another
theory from a retired chemist named John Ruskamp suggests that pictographs
discovered in Arizona are nearly identical to Chinese characters. He puts the
Chinese in the U.S. state of Arizona sometime around 1300 BC. We mention these
two only because we have seen them pop up in newspaper articles recently.
They're thoroughly discredited, so we'll leave it at that. A melting pot indeed
So what to make
of all this?
Well, here at
VOA, we are trying to tell the story of America. And what is clear is that
America was a melting pot hundreds of years before the Statue of Liberty began
urging the world, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free." In fact, the entirety of North and South
America are a polyglot of cultures stretching back before recorded history. And
people have been coming here ever since, chasing a better life, abundant food,
water and opportunity. Today, maybe not
that much has changed.
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