When Christopher Columbus set foot on that Caribbean island called Guanahani by its natives, convinced that he had in fact reached the Orient, the Indies of the East, he quite logically considered the inhabitants of that island to be ‘indios.’ Though it became apparent soon enough that none of these people were actual subjects of the Great Khan, the name stuck. Gradually it was applied to all the aboriginal people encountered in America, North and South, and all became known collectively as Indians.
Ironically, the man who had thus inflicted so ambiguous a name on the inhabitants of two continents, the man who would die without truly realizing the enormity of his miscalculations – that man, for once in his troubled career, had come closer to the truth than anyone was to recognize for a very long time. The American Indian, as it later turned out, was not a true native to this land either – he almost certainly was the descendant of still earlier immigrants into this New World – the heir to a vast assortment of human ancestors who had all but stumbled into the Americas thousands, even tens of thousands of years earlier. And many, if not most of these ancient people appear to have had a lineage that reached far back into such Asian regions as prehistoric China, Japan, Turkey. In all fairness, however, it should be added that these people arrived in the Americas at the very same time as did the ancient native populations in Europe or Asia, and in some cases the Indians’ ancestors may have arrived much earlier still.
At some time during very early human history these ancient people apparently began centuries-long migrations that spread them across much of the world and which gradually brought them into lands which their European cousins would not discover for themselves until several hundred centuries later. And by the time modern Europeans did arrive in the Americas by far different routes and methods, they found there an entirely new and distinctive people, the American Indian, a race so completely alien in both appearance and lifestyle.
There are only the vaguest of legends – and certainly no records at all – that might provide some clues to the many questions about the ancestors of America’s native population. What could have inspired an ancient people to undertake such momentous journeys across several continents? When did they set out, or when did they arrive in America? Or, for that matter, how did thousands upon thousands of primitive, prehistoric men manage to transport their family groups across the ocean barrier that separates the Americas from the rest of the world?
It was not until the early 1900s that archeological discoveries in America began to shed the first rays of light on the drama of human arrival in the New World, gradually tracing their progress throughout the immense stretches of North and South America, century after century, until at last there emerges that most misunderstood, most romanticized, and most tragic figure of popular history, that simultaneously savage and noble warrior, the American Indian.
