This answer is wrongColumbia)Asked in former days where they came from, American Indians answered in as many voices as there were different cultures. Given the hundreds of sovereign societies in North America in the early sixteenth century, this means hundreds of different voices in former times. Each nation or tribe had its own theory in which the ancestors either came from elsewhere—a world beneath the current one, lands in the east or west, near a salty sea, and so on—or had always been where they were at the time the question was posed.
Today, in contrast, many American Indians agree with the consensus among scientists (regardless of their ethnicity) over the origin of American Indians. Today’s consensus, like all scenarios based in science, changes with new data from new sites or with re-interpretations of sites or artifacts long known, in both instances offering fresh insight on the arrival, spread, and behavior of man in the New World. From new data flow new hypotheses, subsequent testing to falsify or confirm them, and adjustments, if necessary, in theories and the conclusions drawn reasonably from them. For over one hundred years—and after a long period of discussion—almost all scientists have agreed that the ancestors of today’s indigenous people came to North America from Asia. And in recent decades they have been in general agreement that these ancient Indians, or Paleoindians (which means “old” Indians), as they are known, arrived some 13,000–14,000 years ago at the end of the period known as the Pleistocene.
Beringia (light brown—area above
sea level during the late Pleistocene;
dark brown—area above sea level today)
Animation
Beringia, 21,000 B.P.
to the present (NOAA)The Paleoindians almost surely came to the New World on foot, walking across land exposed when sea levels were much lower. The colder climate from 65,000 to 10,000 years ago locked water up in continental ice sheets and other ice masses, exposing where the Bering Strait is today a land mass known as Beringia. The corridor from Old to New World has often been called a “bridge,” but the image is unfortunate: the area left high and dry measured some one thousand miles north to south at its widest and offered opportunity in a cold tundra-steppe environment for generatio
