People From Three Continents Migrate to North America

This is an American social studies text that is (most likely) being read, right now in North America. With this assumption in mind, think about these questions: Where did the people in North America come from? How did people get to North America? When did they come? This text is intended to be the very, very short answer to those questions, and answered in broad terms. But the answer to the first question “where did North America's people come from?” is: Three other continents: Asia, Europe and Africa.

Asians Migrate to America
Evidence suggests that the first people to migrate to North America were from Asia. Specifically, from the region of Asia known today as Siberia. During the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago, people lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers. These people followed the game they hunted and lived on.

For a period of time, lasting several thousand years, these Siberian hunters followed the animals they hunted across a “land bridge” which appeared during the Ice Age. This land that is now under the Bering Sea, connected Asia to North America. During this period of global cooling, thousands of years of precipitation (rain and snow) became frozen in glaciers covering much of what is now Canada and northern Russia. This water evaporated from the oceans, which exposed more of Earth’s ocean floor.

The exposed ocean floor became a 1000 mile wide prairie that allowed animals and the small groups of hunters to migrate to North America. Walking through gaps in the glaciers, and eventually settling throughout North and South America, these Asian people became America’s first people. How do we know? We don’t…for sure, it is the best guess based on evidence. There are no written records from that time. Archeologists have found evidence (artifacts - like arrowheads) in North America that are similar to artifacts that were used in Siberia at roughly the same time.

Did they all really walk here from Asia? Again, we use evidence, there are no eyewitness accounts that survive the melinia. Archeologists and other scientists argue that these Asian hunters followed fish and sea mammals as well as Ice Age game like wooly mammoths. They likely followed the coast of Beringia in small boats to the American continents. Some even argue that the lowered oceans during the Ice Age allowed people from the South Pacific to island hop to South America in small boats.

These brave Asian migrants settled into a vast new land that was rich with resources for hunting and gathering cultures. Over time, they developed into America’s indigenous people, whom we refer to now as Native Americans. They developed cultures in part based on the regions they settled in.

Europeans Migrate Over the Open Oceans
Over time,melting glaciers refilled the former sea beds of places like the Behring Sea, and Berengia disappeared under the cold ocean. For the last 10,000 years or so, America was cut off from the other continents. It took humans until around 600 years ago to develop sailing vessels and navigation technology that could successfully cross large open oceans.

In the mid to late 1400s CE, people from the continent of Europe began to transition out of Medieval times to a time period known as the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a time in Europe of rebirth - a renewal of advances in art, philosophy, math and science. The combination of new ideas and new sailing technology (and a desire for wealth through trade), led Europeans to explore further and further from the coastlines of Europe and Africa. Eventually, in 1492, a sailor and navigator named Christopher Columbus sailed three small ships to North America. This was a historic accident, he thought he was sailing across the Pacific Ocean to reach Asia But he misjudged the size of the Earth and found parts of North and South America instead.

It turns out that Columbus was not the first European to reach the American continents. In around 1000 CE, Viking sailors from the European region of Scandinavia explored coastlines in the North Atlantic and eventually found, and settled in the Newfoundland region of Canada. Archeological evidence shows that these Vikings built settlements and stayed in Canada for about 100 years, but for reasons unknown their settlements did not last beyond that. Unlike Columbus, and the Europeans that followed him 500 years later, the Vikings did not have a lasting impact on North America.

Sixteenth Century Europeans however, had a dramatic impact on the Americas that have lasted until today. European nations like Spain, France and England formed large, extractive empires in North, Central and South America. In some cases they found (and forcibly took) wealth (such as gold) from the native people of the Americas. They also shipped huge quantities of natural resources, like timber, fish and animal fur back to Europe. They also established plantations for growing crops to sell. These crops changed the diets of both Europeans and Native Americans, and generated enormous sums of wealth over time.

Taken By Force - Africans Brought to America in Bondage
In the “New World” of the Americas, Europeans competed with one another to colonize as much land, and extract as much wealth as they could. To extract wealth by growing cash crops (crops that are grown to be sold) many workers were needed on these large plantations. This farm work was very hard, and not enough workers from Europe were willing to migrate to provide this labor. So in the early 1500s, people from Africa (West Africa, in particular) were kidnapped, sold and shipped to the Americas to provide labor for the colonial plantations.

Africans who lived on the coast of West Africa had developed trading relationships with Europeans. These same Africans would also fight wars with neighboring people, and would sell their captured enemies into slavery. They became part of an Atlantic Ocean trade network known as “triangle trade.” One point of the triangle was in the Americas, where crops like sugar, tobacco, rice and cotton that were in high demand in Europe, were grown. These goods were shipped to Europe and traded for cash, and manufactured goods like cloth and guns. These finished goods and money were then traded in Africa for human beings. These unfortunate people were then shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas where they were sold to plantation owners and the triangle trade would start again.

The type of slavery involved in this triangle trade was called chattel slavery. “Chattel” is an old-fashioned word that means “property” (personal, movable property, like furniture or animals). What this means, in short, was that these slaves were considered property of the owner, just like a chair or cow would be. This further means that enslaved people in this system had no human rights at all. They were reduced to parts of an economic machine that's only goal was to generate wealth for the European colonists and the European colonial powers that ruled their colonies. Stripped of human rights, enslaved Africans in the Americas provided labor and skills to the colonies as they were exploited and abused by their owners. Over hundreds of years, millions of Africans were shipped to North and South America, and more than a million died just in the middle passage of the trade triangle.

Three Continents - Three Culture Groups
Over a span of about 20,000 years, people migrated to North and South America mainly from the continents of Asia, Europe and Africa. Asians migrated during the Ice Age, between 12,000 and 20,000 years ago, shaping the land and forming cultures that are still here today. Europeans had a lasting impact on the Americas following their migration and colonization beginning in 1492. Africans were brought to America by force shortly after the settling of Europeans in the New World. By the mid-1500s CE, people from the three continents of Asia, African and Europe were living in North America.

A Note About Evidence
How do we know this? Evidence. Nobody alive today witnessed any of the migrations mentioned in this article. Historians, archeologists, anthropologists and other scholars study and argue about pieces of evidence and reach conclusions based on remains of human settlement (like tools or other physical artifacts), documents and oral histories. We have more evidence for some of these migrations, like Europeans or Africans, because we have more types of evidence. For instance we still have surviving diaries from people like Columbus, and documents like insurance policies covering enslaved people. These documents give us more detailed information like specific dates and names (1492, the year Columbus found America for Spain) as opposed to an 8,000 year date range for Asian migration to the Americas.

Furthermore, scholars are continually discovering new evidence. There are small pieces of evidence for other migrants to the Americas, although none of these are generally accepted as conclusive as of this writing. Artifacts (in particular, a skull found in Washington State) suggest people from Europe may have migrated to the Americas during the Ice Age too. Researchers have made arguments for both Chinese and African sailors landing in the Americas before Columbus, and perhaps Irish fishers found their way to eastern North America before the Vikings. As more evidence is found, these theories will be accepted or discarded. But it is pretty safe to say that an article written about this same topic in 50 or 100 years will contain different evidence and maybe even different conclusions about who the people were that migrated to the Americas, when they came and how they got here.