The appearance of human hunters in pre-historic America was to prove a truly momentous occasion, though the actual event surely passed unnoticed by man and beast alike. The people certainly had no clue, nothing to indicate that they had just crossed into an entirely new world. As a people in the nomadic stage, they were doing what came natural: for the past 40,000 years or so, they and their ancestors had roamed over enormous territories, always following the game animals that supplied their bands with all the necessities of life. Wherever the mammoth or the caribou went, the human hunters followed; it was a way of life nearly as old as all human existence. Every so often in the course of such pursuit they might find themselves in some pleasant valley where game was abundant enough to allow the human hunters to stay for a time. Such areas probably also offered a variety of edible wild fruits, berries, acorns, perhaps. There usually were birds eggs, insects and grubs, and they probably also caught fish, perhaps frogs and snails whenever possible. Pleistocene man could not have been overly selective in his menu choices, and in all likelihood ate nearly anything he was able to catch or trap or hunt down.
Sooner or later, however, the human population would increase beyond even the most fertile area’s capacity to provide for them. Without any knowledge of agriculture, without domesticated animals, the wild food supply simply ran out, game animals became scarcer, and at least some of the people were then forced to move on again. It was in such constant cycles of wandering, of settling down and moving on again, that these nomadic bands of Cro-Magnons spread inexorably all over Europe and Asia and beyond. This migration may have begun in Africa perhaps 50,000 years ago. They appeared in Europe around 35,000 years ago and supplanted the Neanderthals; they reached Korea and Japan only a few thousand years later, apparently little intimidated by the ocean waters, as primitive rafts and tools found in Japan would indicate. Cro-Magnons even reached New Guinea and Australia about that same time – a prodigious accomplishment, for despite the lowering of the sea levels during the ice ages, there were still many miles of daunting ocean waters to cross. But nothing, it seems, was going to stop these people; it appears that even at this ancient time they constructed rafts of bamboo, a material that has always been abundant in that area, and set out to sea.
And they finally reached even the northernmost regions of their world, the lands we now know as Siberia. Life in that frigid country is extremely precarious even today; to people like the Cro-Magnon hunters it must have been all but impossible to survive there. At any rate, they never managed to establish themselves permanently in Siberia; again and again, as the ice and arctic weather advanced over the many centuries, humans were expelled and driven southward, only to return whenever the climate would permit them to do so.
The ice sheets of the Pleistocene did not visibly move, of course; they did not advance or retreat so far as any one human’s memory or short lifetime was concerned. To the hunter and his people, the white masses just over the horizon had simply always been there, as permanent as the mountains and valleys and rivers. So, too, had the herds of mammoth, caribou, and horses, thundering across the moist tundra for as far back as even the oldest among them could recall. Perhaps the most incredible aspect of early human existence is time – a time so infinitely longer than all recorded history, centuries upon centuries, hundreds of centuries during which untold generations of humans lived and died and were forgotten, and where nothing ever really changed at all.
