We must remember that the Bering Straits Route is only one of the numerous assumptions that have been made. The time is estimated from 12000 to 25000 B. C., at which time geologists believe the ice cap started to melt.
The Americans were suspected of being Egyptian, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Japanese, Welsh, Irish, or descendants of the lost ten tribes of Israel. Modern science has shown that the American Indians are far more ancient than any of those candidates above mentioned.
Even the last remote Ice Age which drew to a close 10,000 years ago is being pushed back much farther into the past. A recent discovery near Pueblo, Mexico, may push back the horizon to well before 30,000 years ago. These dates can be given with a fair amount of accuracy, long ago as they were, due to the recently developed techniques of Carbon 14. Carbon 14 is present in fixed proportions in most living organisms, and disintegrates at a constant measurable rate after death of its host. It thus acts as a historical“ back track” calendar of measurement.
More recently, Dr. John N. Rosholt has developed a dating process by utilizing“ daughter” products of uranium. This may prove to be more accurate. An interesting blood type study of our Americans in the above way reveals the purest“ A” group in the world, as well as the only known population entirely lacking“ A”. Also the purest“ O” and“ B” group in the world. An eminent geographer concludes that the basic peopling of the Americas may have taken place before the primary blood streams of man became mingled.
The New World was a region in which man became separated into small groups and where over a long period of time cultural diversity could and did, develop. In each of these areas the coming of the white man was a cataclysm, its form varying according both to tribal pattern and to the attitude of newcomers. Introduction of iron was everywhere, as a major factor, because there were no tools of material tougher than stone at the time of European contact. Almost equally impressionable and dramatic was the introduction of firearms, steel traps, and of alcohol.
In a different way the coming of Christianity profoundly altered the aboriginal way of life just at the time when these new impacts threw a tremendous strain upon aboriginal culture, and new diseases reduced the native population. Everywhere( with the exception of the arctic) the old skills became valueless in the face of the wheel of metal, tools, clothing, new standards and attitudes.
Within a space of one or two generations the Indian was called upon to adjust to European concepts and to follow a way of life that in Europe had grown up over a space of thousands of years. Instead of self-sufficiency within the framework of geographical unit, the Indian became dependent upon the whims of an alien market to which he had to conform if he wished to obtain the things that the white man not only offered but pressed upon him with the zeal of the missionary or the trader.
The deficiencies of American Indian culture in comparison with the civilizations of the Old World are not the result of any mental inferiority on the part of American Indians, but are due to the fact that man recommenced his cultural development thousands of years later and had not made up this handicap when Columbus reached the West Indies. Between the sixteenth century and today, the Indian has changed from mastery to a dependency upon strangers in a land that once was his. There have been few cases of a similar reversal within the course of a few generations.
DAILY LIFE AND CULTURE
The outstanding feature of native American culture is its extreme diversity. This is due in part to a varied cultural background from Asia, but far more to New World developments stimulated by the