Some came by a land bridge and others probably skirting the coasts in canoes as they moved southward. Today's Native Americans have a unique genetic footprint due to the mixing.

snip

The first Americans were descended from Asians, and they reached the New World by way of Beringia, a now-submerged land bridge that used to connect Asia to Alaska. Recent research suggests they followed the shorelines of Beringia and the Pacific Coast as they spread into the Americas by at least 15,000 years ago.

The new paper supports a theory that the migrants from Asia spent thousands of years in isolation, either in Beringea or Asia, before entering the Americas. During that time they developed unique genetic signatures that are now found in natives of the Americas.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/science/ancient-dna-gives-glimpse-of-ancestors-of-native-americans/#:~:text=Ancient%20DNA%20from%20Alaska%20gives%20glimpse%20of%20ancestors%20of%20Native%20Americans,-Originally%20published%20January&text=The%20new%20paper%20supports%20a,in%20natives%20of%20the%20Americas.

Though I don't have the book handy anymore so I can't and won't include dates.

The concept in the book, 1491, a reassessment of archaeologic evidence was made. It's a really big book and took me a year to read and digest what I could from it. There is a lot of minute evidence that is more detail than I could deal with but the main thesis is; The land bridge and over to eastern pathways around great glacial masses concept is suspect. It is equally, if not more, likely that migration happened along the coast of the continent moving south to the next continent much sooner than was thought. The book provides detailed construction of this idea with over a thousand pages of description and notable speculation - which is part of the science - showing how they came to such conclusions.


There is more but years after reading it, that is one main thing that stands out for me. I was never comfortable with the land bridge is the only way, man story anthropologists were so comfy with. I had many discussions with faculty during my undergrad years about this. Hell, while I was in school, geologists decided that not only was there a Pangea, they decided there may have been a few or more. It found the book interesting in that it offered a solid basis for some idea other than the land bridge concept. Scenarios are offered which include some use of the land bridge but beyond that, there is speculation that migration down the coast happened a lot sooner than originally thought.

If there is someone more familiar with the book or the concept, please correct me if I'm missing the main theme or wish to add details!

I read it back when it was published, so some memories may be flawed. But for me the biggest takeaway was upending the traditional view of the Spanish colonization. Using texts from Spanish missionaires that were only discovered in the 70s I believe, he related how they told of the subjugation of the Taino people using brutal methods, including gallows, to enforce their will. The natives were expected to work as slaves. The original take by the missionaries that the Taino were quiet and submssive began to change as the natives began to resist the Spanish, and they began describing them in ways that justified the persecution of them.

There were many phases over thousands of years. One I liked was about a coastal group in Peru who had a fish economy and an agricultural economy a little ways inland and they had quite a community for some time but only figured out in the years before the book was published.

bridge, vessels were used to island hop across the Bering Straits? We know that people on the coasts were very navigationally savvy with excellent nautical skills.

a link between a Siberian language and the Athabaskan languages of the New World has been proposed.

https://theworld.org/stories/2017-05-23/remote-siberian-language-ancestor-navajo