In Search of the First Americans

My expedition to Alaska in search of history that occurred 20,000 Years Ago

Welcome to a special edition of Forgotten Footprints.

Today, we have a distinguished guest: Professor Jon Hunner. He retired as a history professor from New Mexico State University and was the director of the New Mexico History Museum.

He is the author of Inventing Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Cold War, and the Atomic West, among others.

Jon has a unique way of presenting history. He travels to places where history happened and has driven over 65,000 miles to 400-odd places to learn more about America’s ancient past.

Learn more about him through his website, Driven by the Past. He’s new to Substack, so please show support by following and subscribing.

Jon will take us back in time and discuss when, where, and how humans first came to America.

A view from above Cape Espenberg, Alaska looking west across the Bering Strait towards Asia. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

I usually visit the places where history happened to write about the past. Still, I couldn’t get to the remote Bering Land Bridge National Preserve for this one about how humans first arrived in the Americas. When I did visit Alaska and saw its craggy coastline, towering mountain ranges, and massive grinding glaciers, I easily imagined arriving at a windswept shore near the Arctic Circle thousands of years ago. I saw a roving band of hunters with stone spears stalking a woolly mammoth across the tundra.

Let’s follow this group as they entered the Western Hemisphere.

Map of Beringia. Courtesy of the National Park Service.

Bering Land Bridge Theory

The story of the first migrations into the Americas is complex, one of evidence (and lack of), conjecture, debate, and faith. Archeologists say that roving bands of Ice Age hunters followed herds of large mammals on a land bridge across the gap from Asia to North America. These First Americans then migrated south as the glaciers retreated at the end of the most recent glaciation period, around 12,000 years Before the Present (BP). After escaping the glaciers, humans quickly spread throughout the hemisphere, adapting to various landscapes and environments. This narrative, known as the Bering Land Bridge Theory, offers a compelling description of how the First Americans arrived.

However, questions nip at this theory. Did roving bands of hunters get through or around the glaciers before 12,000 years ago? Was there only one wave of migration across the Bering Land Bridge or many? Finally, what do today’s Native Americans say about their origins?

As archeologist Beth O’Leary says: “It’s complicated.”

DNA Evidence

Variations in the DNA of today’s Native Americans allow researchers to suggest that more than one wave of migrants from different parts of Siberia and East Asia came to the Americas. As anthropologist Theodore Schurr notes:

“… both the mtDNA [mitochondrial DNA] and the Y chromosome data show evidence that more than one expansion contributed to the genetic diversity of modern American groups.”

So at least several waves of migrating groups from northeast Asia traveled by foot or boat and peopled the new lands.

Beringia

The first European mention of a land bridge occurred in 1590 when José de Acosta, a Jesuit missionary in Latin America, speculated that such a connection between Asia and North America had allowed humans to enter this hemisphere. In the 1930s, evidence established the existence of the land bridge, and in 1937, botanist Eric Hultén dubbed the area between Siberia and Alaska bordering the Bering Straits Beringia.

Climatologists estimate that a land bridge 600 miles (960 km) wide connected the gap between Asia and North America. This land bridge emerged during the last period of worldwide glaciation from 75,000 to 12,000 BP. During that frozen epoch, sea levels dropped as massive ice fields locked up much of the world’s water. As the seas shrank, a land bridge emerged, stretching from the Chukotka Peninsula in Asia to the Seward Peninsula in Alaska.

At the time, glaciers covered all the land, from the windswept shores to the high mountains of Alaska and Canada. As the land bridge slowly rose, these glaciers blocked further movement inland. Our roving band of hunters could have walked to North America on the emergent land bridge. Still, unless they ventured out onto the Laurentian Ice Sheet — which at the time covered over 5 million square miles (13 million square km) of North America and, in places, was two miles (3.2 km) thick — they would have been blocked by the glaciers. Only after these glaciers retreated some 12,000 years ago did ice-free corridors to the south open up for our band of hunters.

Holgate Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska. Notice the tour boat dwarfed at the foot of the glacier. Photo by author.

The 12,000-year-old dilemma

Excavations at caves in Meadowcroft, Pennsylvania, and Monte Verde, Chile, have unearthed objects that show humans lived in those places earlier than 12,000 years ago. Carbon-dated testing puts the cave in Pennsylvania from 14,000 to 20,000 years BP, while Chile’s cave-dwellers lived there between 15,000 and 38,000 years BP.

Another crack in the Bering Land Bridge Theory comes from New Mexico. Dave Bustos, the resource program manager at White Sands National Park, revealed that in 2021, they found fossilized footprints that date back to 20,000 or more years BP. Jeffrey Pigati and Kathleen Springer, researchers from the US Geological Survey, isolated ditch weed seeds in the dune layers above and below the level where the footprints had been found.

Carbon-dating the seeds produced a shock:

“The ditch grass had grown thousands of years before the end of the last ice age…. The oldest footprints at the site — left by an adult human and a mammoth — were located below a seed bed dating back about 22,800 years.”

Nearby, another set of fossilized footprints of an adult and children walked side-by-side until the child’s abruptly disappeared. Perhaps an adult of our roving band of hunters picked up the child and carried her or him.

23,000-year-old fossilized footprints at White Sands National Park. NPS photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Thus, physical evidence from North and South America suggests that humans had roamed the Western Hemisphere long before the ice-free corridors in Alaska and Canada opened up. These findings have questioned the Land Bridge Theory when humans first arrived in the Americas.

With the passage into the rest of the hemisphere from the land bridge blocked by ice until 12,000 years BP, how did people move beyond the beachhead? Either our roving band undertook a dangerous trek over the glaciers, or they arrived by a different route.

Intrepid explorer and Ice Age historian Craig Childs speculates that 16,000 years ago:

“the North Pacific coast offered unobstructed and entirely at sea level migration routes from northeast Asia into the Americas.”

So perhaps they paddled in small, hide-covered boats holding up to 10 people, navigating from the land bridge down the western coastline until they were free of the glaciers. While daunting, this could resolve the 12,000-year-old dilemma.

With a land bridge providing access to North America after glaciation started 75,000 years ago, humans might have begun settling the hemisphere soon after that. Archeologists continue to search for campsites older than the retreat of the last glaciation.

When I stopped at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage, I enjoyed seeing the rich wealth of material culture from the region’s First Nations of the Aleuts, Inupiats, Yuits, Athabascans, Tligits, and Haida. Among the displays at the Center are a hooded raincoat made out of seal bladders, a shirt of bird feathers, a small kayak used for sea travel and hunting, and ice goggles. These artifacts illustrate the innovative ways that humans, over thousands of years, have lived in the frozen north.

Sealskin coat for protection against the stormy weather in Alaska on display at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage. Photo by author.

Once in the Western Hemisphere, humans spread over the landscape like water through a burst dam, corralled only by the edges of the continents. They roamed throughout the country, hunting and gathering from the tundra near the Bering Sea to the equally frigid tip of South America, from the steamy jungles in the central tropics to dense woodlands in the hinterlands, from high mountains to coastal plains to swamps to deserts.

As historian Yuval Noah Harari says:

“No other animal had ever moved into such a huge variety of radically different habitats so quickly, everywhere using virtually the same genes.”

Whatever way humans migrated here, they trekked across North, Central, and South America, searching for the perfect place to live.

The Myth of Virgin Wilderness

As soon as our roving band of hunters entered a region, they altered it. The concept of a virgin wilderness is a potent foundational myth for the United States; however, with their first footsteps, people changed the land. Their presence transformed the environment.

Here are some examples:

• On the Great Plains, indigenous people set fire to the immense grasslands to help create a vast bison habitat from which to hunt those mammals.

• They altered the landscape in arid regions by diverting streams and rivers to irrigate crops.

• Trees for the massive Chaco buildings of the Ancestral Pueblo People of the Southwest deforested nearby woods.

Just by setting foot on a place, humans altered the land.

The Birth of American History

In whatever way our roving band of hunters arrived, they began telling stories to each other about their experiences and beliefs. They attached memories to landscapes, space became a place, and an undifferentiated present became a continuous past. Native Peoples preserved their pasts by orally transmitting these stories and histories through generations. Through these storytellers, American history was born.

A Pueblo grandmother passing on her peoples’ stories to the younger generation. “Story Teller” by Vangie Suina of the Pueblo of Cochiti on display at the Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM. Photo by author.

The First Americans have lived in, impacted, and memorialized their surroundings for thousands of years.

Isolated from the rest of the world after the Bering Land Bridge subsided at the end of the Ice Age, humans living in the Americas evolved in unique ways. Native American historian Alvin Josephy, Jr. explains in 500 Nations that as indigenous peoples of the Americas adapted to their different environments, cultural and physical variations began to appear among them. These included increasingly distinct languages, religions, styles of art and architecture, ways of war, and Neolithic technology. All were components of various First Nation civilizations that have guided hundreds of generations.

What Native Americans Say about Their Origins

While Native American stories memorialize long migrations across the hemisphere, few mention crossing large bodies of water in boats or walking over tundra and glaciers. So, what do they say about how they arrived at their homes?

Many First Americans in the eastern half of the continent lived in complex civilizations of massive earthen mounds with sophisticated understandings of nature and the cosmos. One of the Choctaw creation narratives mentions a sacred mound at Nanih Waiya, which they call “Big Mother.” At this mound, the Great Spirit created the first Choctaw who crawled out of the ground and into daylight.

The origin stories of the Ancestral Puebloan People of the Southwest also revolve around people emerging from an underground world where humans, animals, and spirits lived together and talked to one another. From this unlit underworld, people emerged from a hole called a sipapu. Some groups then embarked on long journeys, going east, west, north, and south until they reached an ocean and turned around. These travels lasted generations in search of the ideal place to live.

Native scholars reconcile the scientific evidence of a land bridge with their origin narratives in various ways. Ernestine Hayes, a writer of the Tlingit Peoples in the Pacific Northwest, reflects on the conflicting views between their origin stories and the Bering Land Bridge Theory:

“The land bridge is what people who follow the religion of science tell themselves…. I think both can be true at the same time.”

Like many of today’s Native Americans, Hayes juggles both worlds — that of a Western scientific worldview with that of ancestral beliefs.

As we reevaluate our knowledge about when humans first arrived in the Americas, we also broaden our understanding of our more recent pasts. When Dr. Edward Jolie, a professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University and of Oglala Lakota/Hodulgee Muscogee affiliation, heard about the fossilized footprints at White Sands, he said:

“If you think back, you know, even 100 or more years ago, a lot of sort of the general perspective was that, well, maybe Native Americans and their ancestors haven’t been here that long. And, you know, part of it was that it’s more insidious when we think back in the late 19th and early 20th century because by assuming a relatively young date for the arrival of Native Americans, it implied that, ‘Well, they haven’t been here that long, so the terrible things that we [non-native peoples have] been doing to dispossess them and remove them from their lands, that’s not so bad.’”

This new evidence about the longevity of human habitation in the Western Hemisphere has revolutionized our understanding of not only the distant past but also recent history.

500 Nations

We now leave our roving band of hunters who, over millennia, established the 500 Nations of Native Americans. However, whenever humans arrived in this hemisphere, these First Americans laid the foundation for the hundreds of generations who followed. Over thousands of years, they spread across North, Central, and South America with unique innovations and ingenuity. Their sustained presence developed sophisticated civilizations that continue to impact our world.

An exuberant figure displayed at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Photo by author.

Do you enjoy tales from lost civilizations and cultures from the ancient world and the Middle Ages?

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References

• Childs, Craig, Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America. New York: Vintage Books, 2018

• Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. London: Vintage, 2015

• Irwin, Lee. Coming Down from Above: Prophecy, Resistance, and Renewal in Native American Religions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008

• Madsen, D.B., ed. Entering America: Northeast Asia and Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004

• West, Frederick Hadleigh, ed. American Beginnings: The Prehistory and Palaeoecology of Beringia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996

• Zimmer, Carl. “Ancient Footprints Push back Date of Human Arrival in the Americas,” September 23, 2021, New York Times

Historic Places Visited

• Alaska Native Heritage Center, Anchorage, Alaska: https://www.alaskanative.net

• .Kenia Fjords National Park, Alaska, https://www.nps.gov/kefj.

• Museum of International Folk Art Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico https://www.moifa.org/