Scientists have figured out how the Indians settled America. How old is the New World?
Half of the first “pilgrim fathers” did not survive the first brutal winter—about fifty survived until spring. Local Indians, seeing the suffering of white people, helped the Europeans look for game and edible plants, and showed what kind of grain could be grown on the local, very problematic soil.
The harvest was bountiful. In the fall, at a harvest festival in 1621, the surviving colonists invited the leader and members of the Squanto Indian tribe, with whose care they survived in the new harsh conditions. The holiday and feast shared with the Indians became the first celebration of Thanksgiving, which is celebrated on the last Thursday of November, and was included in the number of US National Holidays. Then the tradition of celebration remained “for whites only.”
And the first American colony, Plymouth, grew up on the lands of the same tribe, which then almost completely died out from chicken pox introduced by Europeans. The Pequot Massacre, when residents of several Pequot villages were burned along with their houses, was also the work of Plymouth colonists. The Indians began to resist, but it was too late: even the most destructive raids, when dozens of settlements and cities were destroyed in New England, could not change anything. The liberated lands were part of New England, which later became the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Newly arrived Puritans from Great Britain settled in neighboring small towns and settlements and built their own. Between 1630 and 1643 New England received about 20 thousand people, almost 45 thousand moved south or went to the islands of Central America.
One of the popular comparisons used to describe America is Melting Pot(The authorship of this expression is attributed to different people, including the philosopher and writer R. W. Emerson and the authors of the collection “New Rome, or the United States of the World” C. Gepp and T. Pesce. However, it became widespread after the production of a play of the same name (Columbia Theater, Washington, 1908), written by Israel Zangwill, a British journalist and playwright.). Until 1775, this boiler was not yet very hot; The colonists of North America were not bound by a single religion, social equality, or ethnic homogeneity. Read about the "melting pot" of America in the article US Culture and Patriotism.
A third of Pennsylvania was already populated by German Lutherans, Anabaptist Mennonites, and other faiths and sects. Benjamin Franklin was terribly worried that they were not English. But their children all spoke English: among the ancestors of white Americans, most of them were Germans and English. Maryland welcomed English Catholics, French Huguenots spread throughout South Carolina. Delaware was preferred by the Swedes. Poles, Germans, and Italians settled in Virginia. Settlers often ended up in the New World under a so-called contract: someone richer paid for their transportation, but they had to work for it for four years on the spot. The resettlement of young women was paid for by bachelor men - most often with tobacco, at 120 pounds each. The contract could be resold and the signatory could be forced to work off the debts to another person. It was white slavery.
The life of the settlements was regulated by very harsh laws with severe punishments; Puritan religious institutions sometimes turned into wild cruelty: just remember the witch hunt in Salem. Two thirds of the settlers died on the way or in the first months after landing. Sometimes they could not withstand the oppression of the “masters” and went to undeveloped lands or Indian territories and settled there, and when they began to be pursued, they fought back or went even further. The border between developed and undeveloped territory continuously moved westward. Free invaders of land were called squatters or pioneers. This is how a farming civilization of courageous, cruel and mocking people was created, who did not tolerate attacks on their freedom, but did not recognize the right of other people, such as Indians, to it.
Criminals, voluntary and involuntary, murderers, prostitutes, beggars, counterfeiters were sent to America. At special auctions they could be bought for seven years of hard work. England, whose prisons were overcrowded, willingly sent prisoners of war from Scotland and Ireland there. The Irish had it doubly hard: the pioneer English settlers greeted them with hostility.
Europeans of America
In the USA there is German America, French America, Chinese America, Russian, Polish, Jewish America, etc. The largest, of course, is German America. Descendants of immigrants from Germany make up at least 17% of the population of the entire United States. There are especially many of them in Texas, California and Pennsylvania, although there are states - for example Ohio, Nebraska, both Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa - where the heirs of the Germans make up more than a third of the state's population. German America produced not only President Dwight Eisenhower, but also Generals John Pershing and Norman Schwarzkopf, as well as many entrepreneurs and inventors, including the Rockefeller family, beer magnates Anheuser and Bush, Donald Trump, William Boeing, Walter Chrysler and George Westinghouse. Only at the end of the 19th century. from Russian Empire More than 100 thousand Volga Germans moved to America. At one time, the German language became so widespread here that America could have become a German-speaking country rather than an English-speaking country - then world history would most likely have developed in a completely different way.
In less than the last two centuries, about 6 million Italians moved to the United States, and 80% of them came from southern regions Italy, primarily from Sicily. The Italians had a tremendous influence on America, which was not limited to the popularity of Italian restaurants. Today, almost 18 million Americans (6% of the country's population) have Italian roots and consider themselves heirs of Italian settlers. Rudolph Giuliani, Vince Lombardi and Madonna, Lady Gaga, Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, Dean Martin and Tony Bennett, Susan Sarandon, Nicolas Cage and Danny DeVito, John Travolta, Al Pacino and Liza Minnelli, Francis Ford Coppola and Marisa Tomei. You can recall the famous Italian mafia in the United States, with which Russians are familiar from “The Godfather” and “The Soprano Family.” Today at Supreme Court The US is seated by two Italians. Immigrants from Italy strengthened large group adherents of the Roman Catholic Church in the USA, which partly made it possible for John Kennedy to become president, although he himself was a descendant of Irish settlers. Kennedy still remains the only Catholic president in the country's history.
The Irish component of today's American life is difficult to miss for anyone who has spent even a short time in the United States. Irish bars, names, music and elements of everyday life are deeply ingrained in American everyday life. Almost 12% of the country's population list themselves as heirs of Irish settlers in the census. Seven of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence were Irish. Twenty-two American presidents were of the same blood - from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama, whose ancestry on his mother’s side includes Irish ancestors, and besides them, father and son Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Harry Truman... By the way, the Irish-American landowner Charles Lynch at the end of the 18th century. went down in history as " Godfather» unconventional execution, which is still called lynching. Of the three hundred and thirty-two languages surveyed as being spoken in the United States, Irish now ranks sixty-sixth only because many native speakers have adapted to American English. The Irish also joined the ranks of Catholics, although a small part of them, along with Scottish settlers from Great Britain, became Protestants.
About 10 million Americans, that is, more than 3% of the country's population, are of Polish origin. Although the first Poles arrived in the USA back in early XVII century, the bulk of settlers fled here at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century. from the Russian Empire, as well as from the Austrian and German occupations. Among them there were many Jews and Ukrainians. As a result, "Polish Americans" became the largest group of Slavic emigrants from of Eastern Europe. In 2000, about 700 thousand people in the United States named Polish rather than English as their native language. Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulacki became American heroes during the struggle for independence, and statues were erected to both of them in Washington. General Pulatsky generally went down in the history of the country as the “father of the American cavalry.” US Poles are Catholics and play a large role in local religious movements, and there is even a Polish Museum of America in Chicago.
From famous representatives Of the Polish people, every educated American knows Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was National Security Advisor from 1977-1981. President Jimmy Carter, Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Lisa Kudrow from the series "Friends", actors Paul Newman, Natalie Portman, William Shatner, artist Max Weber, film producers Samuel Goldwyn and the Warner brothers, director Stanley Kubrick , singer Eminem. However, for some reason, it was the Poles who in America became the characters in jokes about stupid, narrow-minded and poorly educated people. They are, in fact, the American equivalent of the Chukchi from Russian jokes. If you tell an American any joke about the Chukchi - replacing, of course, the word “Chukchi” with the word “Eskimo” - he will not understand what the point is. If the word “Chukchi” is replaced with the word “Pole,” then the American will laugh the same way as a Russian at a joke about the Chukchi. I have not been able to find out why this happened in America. The main version told to me is that at one time many poorly educated and naive Polish peasants emigrated to America, who began to symbolize a kind of local “Chukchi”. I don’t know about education, but, as it seemed to me, no one ever considered the Poles naive, except perhaps Ivan Susanin.
Despite the outward hostility that the French often demonstrate towards Americans, the reality of America is that about 12 million people in the country consider themselves French, and almost 2 million speak French at home. In Louisiana, about half a million people speak Creole, which is based on a simplified version of French. Quite a few people moved to the United States from the French part of Canada.
The French minority in the United States is less visible because many of its members identify with the Creole and Cajun (in Louisiana) ethnic groups rather than with France proper. The number of French-Americans increased dramatically following America's purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803 (not to be confused with the current US state of Louisiana). By this purchase America acquired, in whole or in part, fifteen of its present states and two Canadian provinces. Today, New Hampshire is the only state where people with French ancestry make up more than a quarter of the population, with the largest numbers living in California, Louisiana and Massachusetts. Most French-Americans are Catholics.
During the development of American territory French was as widespread as English and German, and in many places was the main language of the pioneers. Anyone who has traveled around the USA knows that the country is covered with French names - the states of Arkansas, Louisiana and Delaware, Maine and Illinois, Oregon and Wisconsin... Warren Buffett, Louis Chevrolet, King Gillette, the Dupont family, Jessica Alba, brothers have French roots Baldwin, Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Jim Carrey, the Duvall acting family, Matt LeBlanc from Friends, Patrick Swayze... French blood flowed and flows in the veins of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, presidents Franklin Roosevelt and William Taft, writer Jack Kerouac, etc. .
Among the first to move to the territory of what is now the United States were immigrants from Spain. Their presence has been recorded since 1565. However, most Spanish-speaking immigrants to the United States came from Latin America, especially Mexico and Puerto Rico. Today they are the largest ethnic group in the United States among speakers of Romance languages. It is believed that there are more than 24 million people. Spanish was the first language spoken by European settlers, but then English began to take over. Today, Spanish is the second main language of the United States, second in popularity to English but ahead of any other language spoken in the country.
There is no need to talk about the influence of Spanish culture on American culture. Spanish (and Latin American) cuisine, traditions, holidays, customs and way of life, without exaggeration, have become one of the foundations of American life. What Americans for a long time associated with cowboys, which began in medieval Spain, speaks for itself. Largest quantity Hispanic minorities live in the states of California, New York, Texas and Florida, but Spanish-language names densely cover the map of the country. These are, for example, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Nevada, thousands and thousands of town names and settlements, rivers and hills, nature reserves and mountain ranges. As for the list of Americans with Spanish roots who have entered the history and culture of the United States, it is very long. These include actors from Salma Hayek and Cameron Diaz to Martin and Charlie Sheen, and musicians from Julio Iglesias and Kurt Cobain to Jerry Garcia and Gloria Estefan, politicians and writers, religious leaders and athletes.
Another ethnic group that was among the first to appear in America were the Dutch. History records the date of the founding of the first Dutch settlement in the New World - 1613. Today, about 6 million Americans consider themselves descendants of Dutch settlers. Most live in Michigan, Montana, Ohio, California and Minnesota.
Of course, I did not set out to describe in this book the history of the development of America by the Dutch and the relations of the new state with the Netherlands, but I note that it was the Dutch who first began to celebrate the independence of the United States in 1776 and taught other Americans to salute their state flag. The story of the 1626 purchase of the Manhattan peninsula for $24 has been recounted many times, but New York's boroughs still retain their Dutch names. Many words passed from the same language into American English, including the word “Yankee”. Some American philologists convincingly prove that it was from the old Dutch language that the definite article came to English the, as well as many necessary words- “house”, “street”, “book”, “pen”, etc. The Dutch community plays a large role in the life of the Reformed Church of America and a number of other religious associations.
Three American presidents had Dutch roots, and one of them, Martin van Buuren, the eighth President of the United States, was a real Dutchman. By the way, he turned out to be the only president of the country for whom English was a second language, that is, a non-native language. Before this, Van Buren also served as the eighth vice president and tenth secretary of state of the United States. US history includes many "Dutch Americans", for example, Willem de Kooning, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, the Vanderbilt family, Christina Aguilera, Marlon Brando, Clint Eastwood, Henry and Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, Dick van Dyke, director CIA General David Petraeus, Thomas Edison, Walter Cronkite, Anderson Cooper and many others. For some reason, in America there is a popular tradition of making the Dutch the heroes of many films - thus, as a result, they are present in both “Titanic” and “The Simpsons”.
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They began to slowly keep quiet about Columbus. Yes, there was such a navigator, yes, he brought robbers and morades to this continent. Now, more and more often they write not only about the Vikings, who, due to stubbornness, sailed on a couple of boats to North America, but also about the settlement that happened several thousand years earlier. Who are they - the first inhabitants of America?
For a long time, scientists believed that America was settled by mammoth hunters who moved 11.5-12 thousand years ago from Asia to North America by land. However, this scheme for the colonization of the New World was refuted by the latest sensational finds of archaeologists. Some researchers are now even suggesting that the very first Americans could well have been... Europeans.
European in America 9000 years ago
When James Chatters, an independent forensic archaeologist, was called on July 28, 1996, to examine human skeletal remains discovered on the Columbia River shallows near Kennewick, Washington, he had no idea that he would become the author of a sensational discovery. At first, Chatters believed that this was the remains of a 19th-century European hunter, because the skull clearly did not belong to Native Americans. However, radiocarbon analysis showed that the age of the remains is 9 thousand years. Who was Kennewick Man, with his distinctly European features, and how did he come to the New World? Archaeologists in many countries are now racking their brains over these questions.
If such a find were the only one, one could consider it anomalous and forget about it, as scientists often do with strange artifacts. In an analysis of nearly a dozen early American skulls, anthropologists found only two that showed features consistent with North Asians or Native American Indians.
Archaeologist R. McNash from Boston University back in the 1980s. stated: the hypothesis that the first inhabitants of America crossed the Bering Strait only 12 thousand years ago should be considered untenable, since there are traces of more ancient migrations in South America. Even then, stone tools 18 thousand years old were discovered in the Piaui cave (Brazil), and a spear tip stuck in the pelvic bone of a mastodon 16 thousand years ago was found in Venezuela.
Archaeological finds in America
Nakhodki recent years confirmed the seditious statement of R. McNash at the time. Southern Chile is the most interesting place, which makes scientists think about correcting the old hypothesis. Here in Monte Verde, a real ancient American camp has been discovered.
Hundreds of stone and bone tools, remains of grain, nuts, fruits, crayfish, bones of birds and animals, fragments of huts and hearths - all this dates back 12.5 thousand years. Monte Verde is located at a great distance from the Bering Strait, and it is unlikely that people could get here so quickly, based on old scheme colonization of the New World.
Archaeologist T. Dillihay, who is excavating in Monte Verde, believes that this settlement may be ancient. Recently he discovered charcoal and stone tools in a layer 30 thousand years old.
Some intrepid archaeologists, putting their reputations on the line, claim to have discovered sites older than Clovis, New Mexico (until recently considered the oldest). The numbers given are 17 and 30 thousand years. In the mid-1980s. archaeologist N. Gidon published evidence that the age of the drawings in the Pedra Furada cave (Brazil) is 17 thousand years, and the stone tools from there are 32 thousand years old.
Computer modelling
The latest research by anthropologists is also interesting; thanks to computers and developed programs, they are able to translate into mathematical language the differences in the shapes of the skulls of literally all the peoples of the world. Comparisons of skulls, known as craniometric analysis, can now be used to trace the ancestry of a population group.
Anthropologist Doug Ouseley and his colleague Richard Jantz spent 20 years studying craniometric studies of modern American Indians, but when they examined a number of skulls of the most ancient North Americans, to their considerable surprise, they did not find the similarities they expected.
Anthropologists were amazed at how different many of the ancient skulls were from any modern Native American groups. Reconstructions appearance the ancient Americans were more reminiscent of the inhabitants of, for example, Indonesia or even Europe. Some of the skulls could be attributed to people from South Asia and Australia, and the skull of a 9,400-year-old caveman, recovered from a dry mountain shelter in Western Nevada, most closely resembled the ancient Ainu (Japan). Where did these people with elongated heads and narrow faces come from? If they are not the ancestors of modern Indians, then what happened to them? These questions now concern many scientists.
It is possible that representatives different nations colonized America
and this process extended over time.
In the end, one ethnic group survived or won the “battle” for the New World, which became the ancestor of modern Indians. The first Americans with elongated skulls were probably exterminated or assimilated by other waves of migrants, or perhaps died out from famine or epidemics.
About the European version
An interesting hypothesis is that even Europeans could have been the first Americans. So far this assumption is supported by weak evidence, but it still exists.
Firstly, the completely European appearance of some ancient Americans, secondly, a feature found in their DNA that is characteristic only of Europeans, and thirdly... Archaeologist Dennis Stanford, who studied the technology of making stone tools in ancient site Clovis, decided to look for something similar in other areas of the world. In Canada, Alaska and Siberia, he did not find anything similar, but he found the most similar stone tools in... Spain. Especially the spearheads resembled the tools of the Solutrean culture, which was widespread in Western Europe 24–16.5 thousand years ago.
In the 1970s a maritime hypothesis was proposed for the colonization of the New World. Archaeological finds in Australia, Melanesia and Japan indicate that people in coastal areas used boats as early as 25-40 thousand years ago. D. Stanford believes that currents in the ancient ocean could significantly speed up transatlantic navigation.
It is possible that the first inhabitants of America partially arrived on the continent by accident, carried away by storms and making a grueling voyage across the ocean (which is quite likely is clear from the example of Alain Bombard, who practically crossed the ocean, eating only caught fish and using rainwater). It is also assumed that Europeans may well have made the voyage by rowing boats along the edge of the ice bridge, which during the Ice Age connected England, Iceland, Greenland and North America. True, it is still unclear how successful such a trip could be without a suitable coastline for stopping and resting.
It is possible that the New World was colonized a very long time ago, but how the ancient people did this remains to be determined by scientists. It is quite possible that the previously proposed scheme for settling the New World through the Bering Strait 12 thousand years ago corresponded to the second most massive wave of migration, which, having swept across the continent, “left behind” the very first conquerors of America.
The settlement of all continents (except Antarctica) occurred between 40 and 10 thousand years ago. It is obvious that getting to Australia, for example, was only possible by water. The first settlers appeared on the territory of modern New Guinea and Australia about 40 thousand years ago.
By the time Europeans arrived in America, it was inhabited by a large number of Indian tribes. But before today on the territory of both Americas: North and South - not a single Lower Paleolithic site has been found. Therefore, America cannot claim to be the cradle of humanity. People appear here later as a result of migrations.
Perhaps the settlement of this continent by people began about 40 - 30 thousand years ago, as evidenced by the finds of ancient tools discovered in California, Texas and Nevada. Their age, according to the radiocarbon dating method, is 35-40 thousand years. At that time, the ocean level was 60 m lower than today. Therefore, in place of the Bering Strait, there was an isthmus - Beringia, which connected Asia and America during the Ice Age. Currently, there are “only” 90 km between Cape Seward (America) and Eastern Cape (Asia). This distance was overcome by land by the first settlers from Asia. In all likelihood, there were two waves of migration from Asia.
These were tribes of hunters and gatherers. They crossed from one continent to another, apparently chasing herds of animals, in pursuit of the “meat El Dorado.” Hunting, mostly driven, was carried out on large animals: mammoths, horses (they were found in those days on both sides of the ocean), antelope, bison. They hunted from 3 to 6 times a month, since the meat, depending on the size of the animal, could last the tribe for five to ten days. As a rule, young men were also engaged in individual hunting of small animals.
The first inhabitants of the continent led a nomadic lifestyle. It took “Asian migrants” about 18 thousand years to fully develop the American continent, which corresponds to a change of almost 600 generations. Characteristic feature The life of a number of American Indian tribes is the fact that the transition to a sedentary life never happened among them. Until the European conquests, they were engaged in hunting and gathering, and in coastal areas - fishing.
Proof that migration from the Old World took place before the beginning of the Neolithic era is the lack of a potter's wheel, wheeled transport, and metal tools among the Indians (before the arrival of Europeans in America during the period of the Great Geographical Discoveries), since these innovations appeared in Eurasia when the New World was already “isolated” and began to develop independently.
It seems likely that settlement also came from the south of South America. Tribes from Australia could have penetrated here through Antarctica. It is known that Antarctica was by no means always covered with ice. The similarity of representatives of a number of Indian tribes with the Tasmanian and Australoid type is obvious. True, if we adhere to the “Asian” version of the settlement of America, then one does not contradict the other. There is a theory according to which the settlement of Australia was carried out by immigrants from Southeast Asia. It is likely that there was a meeting of two migration flows from Asia in South America.
Penetration into another continent - Australia - occurred at the turn of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic. Due to more low level ocean, there probably were “island bridges” when settlers did not just go into the unknown of the open ocean, but moved to another island, which they either saw or knew about its existence. Moving in this way from one island chain of the Malay and Sunda archipelago to another, people eventually found themselves in a certain endemic kingdom of flora and fauna - Australia. Presumably, the ancestral home of Australians was also Asia. But the migration took place so long ago that it is impossible to detect any close relationship between the language of the Australians and any other people. Their physical type is close to the Tasmanians, but the latter were completely exterminated by Europeans by the middle of the 19th century.
Australian society, due to its isolation, has largely stagnated. The aborigines of Australia did not know agriculture, and they only managed to domesticate the dingo dog. For tens of thousands of years, they never emerged from the infant state of humanity; time seemed to stand still for them. Europeans found Australians at the level of hunters and gatherers, wandering from place to place as the feeding landscape became scarce.
The starting point in the exploration of Oceania was Indonesia. It was from here that settlers headed through Micronesia to the central regions of the Pacific Ocean. First, they explored the Tahiti archipelago, then the Marquesas Islands, and then the islands of Tonga and Samoa. Their migration processes were apparently “facilitated” by the presence of a group of coral islands between the Marshall Islands and Hawaii. Nowadays these islands are located at a depth of 500 to 1000 m. The “Asian trace” is indicated by the similarity of the Polynesian and Micronesian languages with the group of Malay languages.
There is also an “American” theory of the settlement of Oceania. Its founder is the monk X. Zuniga. He is in early XIX V. published a scientific work in which he proved that in the tropical and subtropical latitudes of the Pacific Ocean currents and winds from the east dominate, so the South American Indians, “relying” on the forces of nature, were able to reach the islands of Oceania using balsa rafts. The likelihood of such travel has been confirmed by many travelers. But the palm in confirming the theory of the settlement of Polynesia from the east rightfully belongs to the outstanding Norwegian scientist and traveler Thor Heyerdahl, who in 1947, just like in ancient times, managed to get from the shores of the city of Callao on the balsa raft “Kon-Tiki” ( Peru) to the Tuamotu Islands.
Apparently, both theories are correct. And the settlement of Oceania was carried out by settlers from both Asia and America.