Arrowheads and Spear Points in the Prehistoric Southeast: A Guide to Understanding Cultural Artifacts

2. The First Immigrants

Tke Firsi Immigrants Man did not originate in the New World, or at least there is no scientific evidence to support such a theory . All of the skeletal remains of people found in the Americasare decidedly Homo sapiens sapiens, modern man. There are no Homo erectus or Neanderthal remains found here, for example. It naturally follows then, that they had to come from somewhere else. The modern Native Americans are morphologically most like the peoples of Asia, although there are numerous differences which are attributed to the length of time they have been separated from their ancestral cultures. Traits that the populations have in common are dark eyes with a tendency toward the epicanthic or Mongolian fold (a fold of skin over the upper eyelid), shovel-shaped incisors (the inward folding of the inside surface of the front teeth which increases chewing surfaces without increasing breadth), and a tendency toward the 5-Y molar cusp pattern rather than the 4+ cusp pattern more common in European populations. Both groups also have hair that is dark and straight, and the males have little facial hair. Blood studies further support this kinship. Because of these similarities to the Asian populations, the most logical place to look for the ancestors of the modern American tribes has been Asia, and the proximity of Siberia and Alaska made that con30 2 nection seem especially likely. Since man did not originate in Siberia either , the problem has been to determine when such a Native American ancestor could have been in that area, and how and when he might have crossed the Bering Strait, the approximately fifty-mile icy channel that now separates the two continents. The Pleistocene epoch, also known as the Ice Age, lasted from about 2.5 million years ago to approximately 11,000 years ago; tnerefore, the world's climate would have been a significant factor in this migration. The Ice Age was not a single long epoch in which much of the earth was covered by snow and ice but was instead a series of long periods of intense glaciation separated by interglacial periods when the world's temperatures were more like those of today. The last of these glacial periods is called the Wisconsin in North America and the Wurm in Europe. Lasting from about 80,000 years ago to about 7000 B.C., this glaciation at its most intense covered about 30 percent of the earth's surface in ice. But the climates fluctuated throughout the Wisconsin, with intermittent periods of warm and cold tempe.atures . This complicated picture is documented by geologists who have made deep-sea cores to determine Shovel-shaped incisors and 4+ molar cusp pattern in upper jaw the cyclical pattern of rising and falling sea levels. Every time the world's temperatures dropped, so did the sea levels, as more of the water was taken up into ice. As the world's climate warmed, more of the glacial ice gradually melted back into the seas, causing their levels to rise slowly again. Correspondingly, the land crust rose from the reduced weight of the ice. At the height of the Wisconsin, northwest Europe, Greenland, and the north5 -Y molar cusp pattern in lower jaw The First Immigrants 31 Extent of Beringia in the Western Hemisphere ernmost part of the Americas were part of one gigantic arctic continent , and the sea levels dropped by at least 280 feet at one point in the cycle. These periods of dropping sea levels are important in some theories of when man first entered the New World, because during those periods, Siberia and Alaska were not separated by an icy channel but were part of one huge arctic continent . Scientists refer to this exposed area not as the Bering Strait, but as Beringia, a "land bridge" which was, at its widest, some 1,000 miles across. Paleontological evidenceindicates that horses and camels developed in the New World and crossed Beringia into the Old, whereasmastodons , mammoths, elk, and moose, all developed in Old World and crossed into the New. It is conceivable that man came with them at some point. There is evidence of human settlement in Siberia by at least 35,000 to 30,000 years ago. (In Siberia as in the Americas, archaeological investigations are always underway, and that date is probably being pushed further back in time.) It would seem that from that time on human migration...