Peter N. Herndon
There are only a few remnant islands in the Bering Sea that give evidence of the original "land bridge" that once existed between the North American and Asian continents. One of these is a bleak stretch of mostly gravel and black lava called St. Lawrence Island, ninety miles long and thirty-five miles wide. During the eight months of winter, the island is surrounded by ice and during the summer it is often fogged in. The growing season is only sixty days long. The island has a year-round population of about 1,500 people and has been inhabited since 100 B.C. (Morgan, page 20), according to carbon-dating methods.
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The residents of St. Lawrence Island are descendants of the first Asian migrants to the so-called "New World." They are Eskimoes who still stretch walrus hides on wooden racks to make traditional skin boats for whale hunting every spring, since the noise of modern aluminum boats causes the whales to dive out of harpoon range. There are no island roads to speak of, so the people get around by modern dune buggies. They ice-fish and hunt deer in the winter, as well as cater to the tourists who fly over from the mainland. Their lives are a curious blend of the ancient and modern worlds.
Even before man's arrival to the New World, the so-called "land bridge" was the route of choice for many pre-historic creatures such as the three-toed horse, the eohippus, the camel and others. And what about man's first steps onto North American land? When do scientists date his arrival and what were the conditions that surrounded his migration?
Semi-nomadic Asiatic people lived on Beringia, the subcontinent that connected eastern Siberia and Western Alaska, and contained a low basin where animals and people from northern China and Mongolia lived to flee the spread of the glaciers. It was fertile, but its existence was temporary. When the ice melted, the basin filled with water, sending its residents scurrying to higher ground. According to scientists, between 15,000 and 10,000 B.C., the final flood began, caused by the melting ice of the huge glaciers. First the western plain flooded, preventing a return to Siberia. The only choice was to travel east, into the less fertile plains of Eastern Beringia. The scene must have been terrifying:
During the evacuation, as catastrophic as anything in human experience, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people fled the plain, as biting winds blew down from the glaciers, darkening the sky with volcanic grit. Imagine families separated and children lost, a scene of confused alarm and desperate flight as the tide broke through the straits, linking the Arctic Ocean with the Bering Sea for the first time in thousands of years, drowning the plant life, and disrupting the great animal herds. (Morgan, p. 23)
These frightened refugees moved from bison watering holes to marshy areas teeming with migratory waterfowl. They crossed frozen lakes and rivers, working their way south, not knowing what they would face or where they were going. This was the "Great Migration" of Early Man. These were the First Families of America. And they walked here. Some groups moved eastward into Alaska and Canada. Some moved farther south down the Rocky Mountains into Montana and Colorado where there were no more threat of glaciers. Some went as far as Mexico and beyond, across Panama into Colombia, down the coast of Chile, and even as far as the tip of South America, a distance of 12,000 miles. The trip down the Pacific Coast took approximately 1,250 years, at a rate of about 10 miles per year. (Morgan, page 24)
The earliest American immigrants began inhabiting two continents with nobody else already there. Nobody to run them off their land. Nobody telling them to "go home where they came from." They would have this land exclusively to themselves for about 15,000 years! What they would do in America and how they would advance culturally is the subject of our next segment.