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| A skull from Lagoa Santa, Brazil (Natural History Museum of Denmark) |
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| Were the Native Americans "human"? |
Tens of thousands of years ago, two gigantic ice sheets smothered the northernmost parts of what has since been named North America.
They towered more than two kilometers high and contained 1.5 times as much water as Antarctica does today. They were daunting, impassable barriers to the early humans who had started moving east from Asia, walking across a land bridge that once connected the regions now known as Russia and Alaska.
But once the ice started to melt, these peoples -- [allegedly] the ancestors of the Americas’ Indigenous groups -- spread southward into new lands. What happened next?
All this suggests that, about 14,000 years ago, the southern lineage of early American Indians spread through the continent with blinding speed. To picture their movements, don’t think of a slowly growing tree, incrementally sending out new branches and twigs. Instead, imagine a starburst, with many rays zooming out simultaneously and rapidly.
In a matter of centuries, these people had gone down both sides of the Rockies, across the Great Basin, and into Mexico’s highlands. Within a couple more millennia, they had zipped down the Andes, through the Amazon, and as far south as the continent allowed. “Once they were south of the ice, they found a territory that was open, vast, and full of resources,” says Moreno-Mayar, who is based at the University of Copenhagen. “They were adept hunter-gatherers, so they expanded very quickly.”
This pattern confirms the suspicions of archaeologists, whose finds had long suggested that... More
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