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Source: Encyclopedia Smithsonian

Origin of the American Indians –

Estreito de Bering – Massa de água de aproximadamente 64 kilômetros de largura que separa a Rússia (nordeste da Sibéria) dos Estados Unidos (oeste do Alaska), localizado no extremo norte do Oceano Pacífico. Por este estreito se supõe que os primeiros habitantes humanos chegaram ao Novo Mundo, vindos da parte leste da Ásia.

The American Indians are physically Mongoloids and thus must have originated in eastern Asia. The differences in appearance of the various New World tribes in recent times are due to (1) the initial variability of their Asian ancestors; (2) adaptations over several millennia to varied New World environments; and (3) different degrees of mixing in post-Columbian times with people of European, African, and Asian origins. Differences from their relatives in northeastern Asia are also due to changes in the latter populations after the separation.

The Bering Strait, where the Eastern and Western Hemispheres face one another across a narrow strip of water, is the most likely place for migrating groups to have crossed into the New World. There is not sufficient evidence for immigration via other routes before the Norse arrivals in Greenland and Newfoundland about A.D. 1,000, and if indeed any other early voyages occurred, they were insignificant for the origins and composition of New World populations.

Just when the Paleo-Indians – the first inhabitants of the Americas – entered the Americas is still under investigation. The prevailing theory calls for bands of interior hunters passing over the Bering Land Bridge, when sea levels were as much as 300 feet below at the end of the last Ice Age, and preceding through an "ice-free corridor" between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets to reach unglaciated lands to the south. Another theory calls for a coastal movement along the southern edge of the Land Bridge by early sea-adapted peoples. Certainly Paleo-Indians were well established south of the ice sheet by 12,000 years ago. Yet those probably were not the first arrivals. Sites and artifacts claimed to be older than this are gaining acceptance, but anything dated older than about 14,000 years ago, the date when rising sea levels submerged with Bering Land Bridge, separating Asia from the Americas, is still regarded with skepticism. However, some scholars do feel that humans were in North America at least by 20,000-25,000 years ago.

At no time, however, was the peopling of the New World a mass movement of people. More likely it was a trickle of small groups or bands entering from Asia over thousands of years. Among the last to arrive were the ancestors of the Eskimos who, settling along the Arctic coasts, effectively ended the migrations.

The following publications provide further details:

Billard, J. B., editor. The World of the American Indian. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1974. Reprinted 1979. (Introduction to the American Indian with chapters by ten distinguished scholars. See especially the chapter "Across an Arctic Bridge" by J.D. Jennings.)

Bryan, A. L. New Evidence for the Pleistocene Peopling of the Americas. Orono: Center for the Study of Early Man, University of Maine, 1986.

Canby, T. Y. "Far-flung Search for the First Americans," National Geographic 156(3):330-364, 1979.

Carlisle, Ronald., editor. Americans Before Columbus: Ice Age Origins. Ethnology Monographs 12. Pittsburgh, PA: Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh.

Dumond, Donald. "The Archaeology of Alaska and the Peopling of America." Science 209: 984- 991.

Fagan, Brian. Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991.

Fladmark, Knut. "Routes: Alternate Migration Corridors for Early Man in North America." American Antiquity 44:55-69.

Greenberg, J. H., C. G. Turner II, and S. L. Zegura. "The Settlement of the Americas: A Comparison of the Linguistic, Dental, and Genetic Evidence." Current Anthropology 27:477-497.

Haynes, C. Vance. "The Earliest Americans." Science 166:709-715.

Hopkins, David. "Aspects of the Paleogeography of Beringia During the Late Pleistocene." In Paleoecology of Beringia, edited by D. Hopkins, J. Matthews, C. Schweger, and S. Young, pp. 3-28. New York: Academic Press, 1982.

Humphrey, Robert and Dennis Stanford, editors. Pre-Llano Cultures of the Americas: Paradoxes and Possibilities. Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979. (Consists of lectures delivered to the Anthropological Society of Washington in 1976-77 concerning recent scientific evidence for early humans in the Americas and some of the problems of dating and faunal analysis.)

Jennings, Jesse David. Prehistory of North America. 3rd ed. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Pubs., 1989. 974. (An authoritative summary; see on origins.)

Jennings, Jesse D., ed. Ancient North Americans. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1983.

Mead, Jim I., and Meltzer, David J. eds. Environments and Extinctions: Man in Late Glacial North America. Orono, ME: Center for the Study of Early Man, University of Maine at Orono, 1985.

Meltzer, David J. "Why Don't We Know When the First People Came to North America?" American Antiquity 54(3):471-490.

Natural History magazine series of 14 articles on early man in the Americas that began November 1986.

Snow, Dean R. The Archaeology of North America (The Indians of North America Series.) New York: Chelsea House, 1989.

Snow, Dean R., ed. Native American Prehistory: A Critical Bibliography. (Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian Bibliographical.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.

Shutler, Richard Jr., editor. Early Man and the New World. Sage Publications, 1983.

Stanford, Dennis. "Pre-Clovis Occupation South of the Ice Sheets." In Early Man in the New World, edited by R. Shutler, pp. 65-72. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983.

Willey, Gordon R. An Introduction to American Archaeology: North and Middle America. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966. (Authoritative survey from the earliest prehistory to European colonization; now somewhat outdated.)

Willey, Gordon, ed. Pre-Columbian Archaeology: Readings From Scientific American. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980.

Williams, Stephen. Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

American Indian –

Also called Amerindian, Amerind, Indian , or Native American, member of any of the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere, with the exception of the Eskimos and Aleuts.

The ancestors of the American Indians were nomadic hunters of Asian Mongoloid stock who migrated chiefly over the Bering Strait land bridge into North America probably during the last glacial period (about 20,000 to 35,000 years ago), though some debated estimates place the earliest migrations much earlier. These migrants shared certain cultural traits with their Asian contemporaries, including the use of fire, the domesticated dog, and particular rites. Other traits of Old World culture (e.g., animal husbandry, cultivation of certain plants, and the wheel and the plow) were absent in the Americas.

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