My Father’s America
A Tribute Blog

 For uncounted centuries thereafter, the bands spread far and wide across the Americas, reinforced by newcomers whenever the Bering Sea allowed them to cross.  There were at least two distinct migrations, several thousand years apart, and there were probably several more - which may well explain the amazing diversity in languages and appearances among Native Americans.  But finally, about 10,000 years ago, when the waters closed over the Beringia lands for the last time, the break with their ancestral homelands had become all but final.  The Old World Stone Age hunter was about to become a New World man.

By that time, the human bands had already spread far beyond the Great Plains.  Some had branched off to the east, probably following the river valleys again; others had moved westward across Rocky Mountain passes that had been spared by the ice, perhaps becoming the first humans to experience the leisurely life of ancient California.  Still others were drawn southward into Central America and the Yucatan, into Mesoamerica, where soon they became the forerunners of civilizations that would rival those of the Old World.  Gradually, some trickled into the immense South American continent, advancing steadily southward over thousands of years, until even inhospitable Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of the Americas was claimed as their hunting grounds.

This leisurely occupation of two continents from Alaska to Cape Horn may well have taken something like 30,000 years or more, and was, in fact, still going on when Columbus and his peers arrived in the New World.  But along the way the ancient Asiatic hunter had changed.  America was beginning to shape new traits, new traditions, new legends among the people.  Long forgotten were the ancestral lands; Asia, the Pleistocene version of the Old Country, had forever been lost somewhere in the fog over Beringia.  Forgotten, too, were many of the old ways, or any kinship that might have existed with those who had remained behind.  And had not a few of these ancient hunters left behind some small signs of their existence, they, too, would soon have been forgotten.

 Whatever their method of arrival, once on the American side of the Pacific, many of them began to spread out southward, especially during the centuries when severe weather cut off the routes westward across land or water, and their routes can still be traced through archeological finds in Alaska and Canada.  Most such discoveries were made along the foothills of the Alaskan range; no doubt, the lowland tundra of Ice Age Alaska must have been far too wet for human taste and comfort, while the higher elevations provided ideal lookout points for men in search of game.

The interior of Alaska, on the other hand, along with the Mackenzie River Valley, seems to have been spared by the ice all during the last Ice Age; in fact, this region seems to have been a virtual green bowl, protected by mountain walls, with a far more pleasant climate than today.  The remains of large trees have been found along with mammoth bones in areas that are now barren tundra.  This ice-free country must have been a veritable Eden for the herds of animals driven from other areas by the lack of food, and the hunters who now arrived in the same area must have had easy pickings.  The human population, at any rate, seems to have increased fairly rapidly, and the hunting groups began to spread out southward into the North American continent, where earlier generations of people had already preceded them.  They trickled down along the Mackenzie River Valley, along the eastern flanks of the Rocky Mountains, and from there into the Great Plains.  While these plains are now a relatively dry tableland, at the end of the Pleistocene they were overgrown with tall grasses, even some forests, and dotted with lakes and marshes.  Such country offered ideal grazing land to the very animals herds pursued by the early American hunters.  It may well have been a virtual hunting paradise that even Africa could not have surpassed.

 Exactly when such events could have taken place remains mostly speculation and theory.  When the first Europeans arrived in the late 15th century, they found even among the most advanced Indian civilizations no domestic animals in the conventional sense - there were no horses, no cattle, no sheep or pigs or goats.  Only the dog had become a companion to many of America’s natives, and that was probably as much the dog’s doing as it was any human attempt at domestication.  And aside from the distinctly native maize, none of the Indians knew anything of cereals or grains.  Since inhabitants of the Old World regions are known to have domesticated such plants and animals more than 10,000 years ago, it is reasonable to assume that the migrations into America had come to an end long before that time; people would hardly have left such essential knowledge behind.  But when these migrations began is far more difficult to determine.  They were certainly well under way during the last glacial period, about 25,000 years ago.  Around 20,000 BC, and almost certainly earlier, some humans, at least, had already begun the long process of occupying the American continent.

If the Beringia land was in fact the main entry into the Americas for the Pleistocene hunters, their opportunities were somewhat limited by the climate.  There were only certain periods during the last Ice Age in which the water levels had receded enough to expose dry land: between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago; again between 36,000 and 32,000 years ago; and one final impressive stretch of 15,000 years from 25,000 to 10,000 years ago.  Still, this adds up to an incredible total of nearly 30,000 years, many times the span of all recorded human history, during which these ancient people and their game animals were able to roam freely back and forth across the tundra-like lands connecting the two continents; centuries upon centuries of plodding across the plainly marked trails which lured the Asiatic hunters into the frigid north and from there into a truly New World.

 It was long assumed that during these millennia all contacts necessarily came to an end between the people on either side.  But recent discoveries have once again challenged that traditional view of Ice Age hunters wandering in blissful ignorance across Beringia into America.  It has become clearly evident that some of these people, at least, had already adapted themselves to ocean travel - and hunting as well - perhaps as long ago as 15,000 years, and that some were shortly after beginning to settle along the Alaskan and Canadian coasts, using harpoons to go out after the teeming sea life.  This would also mean that they must have had some sort of watercraft capable of transporting them across considerable stretches of water.  And if their distant cousins were able to reach Japan and Australia at least 30,000 years ago, if not earlier, there is no reason to assume that thousands of years later the hunters of the far North Pacific were any less adept.  There seems little doubt that at least some of them could have moved along the coastal areas of Siberia and North America, even down along the shores of Canada-to-be, the western United States, and finally into South America.  Still, it is safe to assume that such ancient seafarers constituted a small percentage of the new arrivals to North America.

 At Siberia’s northernmost tip, where the territory of today’s United States comes closest to the Asian continent, the two lands are separated by a treacherous, fog-shrouded sea of arctic waters and ice known as the Bering Strait.  The Bering Strait is only 56 miles wide, with two islands offering refuge if anyone might attempt a sea voyage across.  The longest leg of such a voyage, in fact, would be a mere 25 miles, with land always in sight on clear days.  But during the Pleistocene, when such vast amounts of ocean water were absorbed into the gigantic glaciers of the Ice Age, reducing sea levels by hundreds of feet, many of the world’s coastal plains were widened by 200-300 miles, exposing enough dry ground to increase the Earth’s landmass by nearly ten percent.  During these times, the Persian Gulf all but dried up; the Adriatic Sea shrank back so dramatically that places like today’s Venice and Trieste would have found themselves 150 miles or more inland.  The Mediterranean Sea was transformed into a huge dry valley which may have contained a small lake or two, but was entirely cut off from the Atlantic Ocean by a land barrier across the Strait of Gibraltar - which at the same time connected the coast of North Africa with the Spanish peninsula.  The seas around the British Isles and the English Channel all but disappeared, connecting Ireland to England, linking England with France.And it was during these same times that the continents of North America and Asia were joined in the Bering Strait region, where the lowering of the seas had created a continuous land mass of tundra and swamps that may have been more than 1,000 miles wide from north to south.  Even today, in fact, the Bering Sea is so shallow that if sea levels dropped a hundred feet or more, much of that same land would reappear.  What’s more, this ancient land, known as Beringia, appears to have been free of ice for much of the time even during the Pleistocene.

It is almost certain that across this Beringia land came many, if not most of the Pleistocene nomads into America.  They roamed across this exposed ground for periods of thousands of years, following game and inclination, unaware of any separate continents which, in fact, did not exist.  Some stayed on at the American side, others moved back and forth, always in pursuit of the migrating herds.  But several times during the so-called interglacial periods, the centuries when much of the ice melted and the glaciers retreated, the Beringia land disappeared under water again, cutting off this physical link between the two continents for periods of thousands of years at a time.