Coming to America
My high school history class spent a bit of time explaining how folks got to the Americas. Keep in mind that this was about 65 years ago. We learned about Columbus in 1492 and the slight possibility that Eric the Red’s son Leif Erikson might have made it via Greenland much earlier. We learned that the West Coast was discovered by immigrants from Asia traveling across the ice bridge from Russia to Alaska and then migrating Southward.
Over time, history changed. “Leif Erikson, a Norse explorer born around 970 CE, sailed from Greenland to North America after being blown off course on a voyage from Norway around 1000 CE, according to the Icelandic sagas. He landed in a region he called Vinland, noted for its forests, grapes, and mild climate, and established a small settlement known as Leifsbudir. This area is generally associated with the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada, where the archaeological site L’Anse aux Meadows was later discovered and dated to approximately 1021 CE.
The sagas describe that Leif’s voyage was inspired by earlier reports from Bjarni Herjólfsson, who had sighted lands west of Greenland around 986 CE but did not land. Leif’s expedition included a crew of about 35 men, and after wintering in Vinland, he returned to Greenland with timber and grapes, earning the nickname “Leif the Lucky”. While Leif himself did not return to Vinland, subsequent Norse explorers, including his siblings and other Icelanders, continued to explore. Leif Erikson’s discovery of North America is dated to around 1000 CE, making him the first known European to set foot on the continent, centuries before Columbus’s voyage in 1492. While the sagas had been considered historically unreliable, we now believe at least some of them to have been accurate.
What will we discover that changes history in the future? “Archaeological evidence shows that indigenous peoples had inhabited parts of North America for thousands of years. For example, human habitation in Newfoundland dates back at least 9,000 years, with earlier Maritime Archaic cultures appearing about 5,000 years ago.” Currently, it is assumed that this evidence is a result of Asian migration, where people migrated from West to East. Is it possible that during the Ice Age people from Europe were able to travel by land or along the coastline to reach the Americas? It’s possible, but there is no evidence so far.
On the other coast the assumption from my history class days was that the migration probably was initiated 12 to 15,000 years ago based on the oldest archaeological sites that had been discovered at that time. More recent research, however, suggests a human presence dating to between 18,000 and 26,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Maximum. Not the least of which is Monte Verde, a Paleolithic archaeological site in the Llanquihue Province in southern Chile, located near Puerto Montt, Los Lagos Region. The site is primarily known for Monte Verde II, generally suggested to date to 14,500 years ago, which has been largely accepted (though not without dissent) as showing that the human settlement of the Americas predates the Clovis culture by at least 1,000 years, contrary to the now discredited “Clovis first” paradigm. The site also contains an older, much more controversial layer (Monte Verde I) suggested to date to 18,500 cal BP (16,500 BC), which lacks the general acceptance of Monte Verde.
Some of the oldest sites in North America https://letstalkgeography.com/web-stories/7-of-the-oldest-archaeological-sites-in-north-america/