Hello and welcome to the third lecture podcast in the Sheridan College General Arts and Science Core Course, Intersections of World History. In this podcast, we'll turn our attention to the Americas. We'll see how the first human beings migrated from the old world to the new. Along the way, we'll examine some of the latest scientific theories about how this happened.
We'll see how agriculture was independently invented in the New World, leading to a whole different group of domesticated plants, such as corn, tomatoes, and peppers. We'll look at the earliest farming communities and civilizations in the Americas and compare them to those that we looked at in the Old World last week. And finally, we'll see how human beings populated the Pacific Islands from New Zealand to the Hawaiian Islands. All that today, on Intersections of World History. The learning outcomes for this lecture podcast are number one, explain current theories about how the Americas were first populated.
Number two, understand the variety and complexity of indigenous lifestyles and cultures in the Americas. Number three, describe the agricultural revolution in the Americas and the first farming civilizations. And number four, understand how humans first populated the Pacific Islands.
Last week, we had an overview of human evolution and the migration of humans around the world. By approximately 45,000 years ago, humans had reached really every part of the Old World. Now, when I say the Old World, I'm referring to the connected continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe. Humans had also managed to get to Australia.
However, of course, one large section of the world was still untouched by humans. Namely... the Americas. In our last lecture, I discussed how roughly 25,000 years ago, humans made that leap too.
We'll be going into much more detail about that today. Humans had also yet to reach New Zealand and the many small Pacific islands, which we will refer collectively to as Oceania. Today, we'll see how humans conquered these last frontiers, but we'll also see how the very isolation of these areas. would create unique characteristics of culture and technology not seen anywhere else in the world.
When humans entered into the Americas, the world was in the grip of the last ice age. A huge ice sheet covered the northern half of the planet. So much water was frozen that water levels around the world were much lower than they are today. In fact, North America was connected during this time by a land bridge known as Beringia. Approximately 10,000 years ago, however, the world began to warm up.
The ice melted, water levels rose around the world, and Beringia disappeared. From this point onward, the Americas were cut off from the old world, cut off from developments in technology, language, and culture, cut off from diseases too. This allowed the indigenous peoples of the Americas to chart a very different and unique course.
The isolation of these parts of the world would have profound implications for history. The American continents boast an incredible variety of different geographic and climatic regions. After the last ice age, humans adapted their cultures and technologies to survive in all of these very different regions. From the high arctic, the Canadian shield, the interior plains, the temperate, warm Central American mainland, the Amazonian basin and rainforest, and to the tip of South America, the Patagonian Shield.
Each of these regions required incredibly different strategies to survive in. Each of them required different adaptations. Thus we see the incredible range of lifestyles of indigenous peoples.
From the Inuit in the high arctic, to the peoples of the Amazonian rainforest, the farming communities around the Great Lakes in what would one day be Ontario and northern New York, to the great city-based civilizations of Mesoamerica and Peru. In Oceania, sophisticated seafaring people would transverse the oceans and found settlements on the islands of Polynesia, the Hawaiian Islands, and eventually, even New Zealand. And for most of the history of these people, they were cut off. from the rest of the world, and they were also cut off. from each other.
Thus, the peoples of the Americas were in their own bubble, and the peoples of Oceania were in another. This vast expanse of time can be referred to as the pre-contact period, a period in which the old world and the new worlds were separated. So how do we know anything at all about these peoples? Well, there are a variety of primary sources which can tell us all sorts of things about them and their lives.
First of all, we have archaeological evidence, which tells us a lot about their diets and their cultures. From archaeology, we also have artifacts, objects, tools, artistic pieces, jewelry, just about anything you can imagine humans creating. In some regions, particularly the city-based civilizations, we also have surviving architecture, buildings.
However, not... every region or lifestyle strategy was suitable for permanent structures built of stone or other durable substances. Many indigenous peoples were semi or completely nomadic and built with perishable materials such as wood, but even in these instances chemical analysis of soil can still tell us much about their structures.
Art. This we have in abundance from all over the Americas and Oceania. Everything from paintings on rock and caves to objects of artistic or religious significance. For certain groups of indigenous peoples, we also have writing.
Now, you need to remember that writing generally only develops alongside civilizations. The complexity of civilizations naturally leads to writing. There's usually no need for a nomadic people to have it. Thus, we see it develop in the city-based civilizations of Central and South America. Now, not all ancient writing has been deciphered.
But where it has, it obviously gives us a wealth of information. Where we don't have writing, we have oral history. Oral history is the cultural memories of a people passed down from generation to generation.
It can actually be incredibly accurate and sometimes provides context archaeology and other sources lack. Finally, after first contact with Europeans beginning in the 16th century, We also have European written sources describing the indigenous peoples and cultures they were encountering. However, these sources can be problematic, as the Europeans did not always understand what they were seeing. Misinterpretation and outright hostile depictions are common.
Nevertheless, from all of these types of primary sources, we can build up a picture of the lives of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Oceania prior. to first contact. Another important source which tells us more about the story of indigenous peoples of the Americas and Oceania is genetic research.
Indeed, over the past 20 years, a number of discoveries have allowed us to get a much more accurate idea about exactly when the populations of the Old World and the New World split, giving us a clearer picture about when and how the Americas and Oceania came to be populated. Okay, so here's what we can say so far. With respect to the populations of the Americas, there are a number of things we can say for certain. However, there are still many unknowns.
The ancestral root for all indigenous peoples in the Americas is Asia. Through genetic research, we can say for certain that all of the indigenous peoples of the Americas have the same common ancestors who lived in Northeast Asia approximately 50... 30,000 years ago. Approximately 36,000 years ago, genetic research shows us that the ancestors of all indigenous Americans split from the Asian population. But when did they arrive in the Americas?
We can say for certain that there were people living in the Americas by 14,500 years ago, although the date is almost certainly probably older than that. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. in a moment. The picture is also complicated by the fact that there was a later wave of people, the ancestors of the modern-day Inuit, who migrated into North America from Siberia approximately a thousand years ago.
And the population by first contact in the 16th century of both North and South America combined would have been at least 50 million people, but could have been much higher, perhaps 100 million or more. Now, all of these issues are still fiercely debated among scientists and scholars, and new discoveries come to light all the time. The peopling of Oceania was also at a later period, beginning approximately 6,000 years ago. Humans who had developed seafaring technology split from the indigenous population of what is now Taiwan and began to explore and settle islands in the southwest Pacific.
The ethno-linguistic group known as the Polynesians would populate the vast regions of the Pacific Ocean with the three island groups at its corners, Hawaii, Easter Island or Rapa Nui, and New Zealand. Collectively, this area is known as Polynesia or Oceania. Interestingly, a recent study published in the Journal of Nature has shown that the populations of indigenous Americans and Polynesians mixed long before European first contact, sometime approximately 800 years ago.
Although it is still a bit of a mystery about the specifics of how this happened, whether it was people from South America traveling east to Polynesia or the other way around. Let's turn back for a moment to the initial populating of the Americas. Over the years, there have been many different theories about how this came to happen. I want to introduce you to some of them so that you can understand how scientists and archaeologists revised theories over time as new evidence comes to light. The original theory about how the Americas came to be populated was known as the Clovis Overland Theory.
The Clovis Theory was named for an archaeological discovery during the 1920s of ancient humans in Clovis, New Mexico, along with a similar site in Flosum, New Mexico. The Clovis people were big game hunters during the last ice age. They hunted mammoth and other large extinct ice age mammals. They were known for making a distinctive type of spear point known as the Clovis point.
And the culture and technology of these spear points can be found throughout much of the Americas, leading scientists to speculate that they were the earliest human population here. and the ancestors of all Native Americans today. The oldest Clovis site dates from around 11,000 to 11,500 years ago.
The theory was that the Clovis people arrived in the Americas via a land bridge known as Beringia, which once connected the continents during the last ice age. Now, if you recall, during the last ice age, there was a massive ice sheet that covered much of the northern part of the world. It was up to... two miles high at some points.
According to the theory, towards the end of the Ice Age, the Clovis people were living in Siberia and followed herds of animals through an Ice III corridor which had opened up, allowing them to enter into North America. Thus, the early archaeological sites of Folsom and Clovis would correspond to this migration. However, it is important to note that the ice sheets blocked this route until approximately 13,000 years ago when the world began to warm up and cracks appeared, creating a passageway between them.
So the Clovis people would only have been able to travel over land beginning at that point. However, later archaeological discoveries problematized this theory, the most famous of which was in Mount Verde in southern Chile. During excavations begun in the 1970s, Archaeologists unearthed numerous human artifacts, including the remains of huts, fire pits, and food scraps.
Originally, these finds were radiocarbon dated to around 14,500 years ago, and this date has since been extended to as far back as 18,000 years ago. Originally, this discovery was so shocking that it was not widely accepted among scientists. However, the evidence for this early occupation was overwhelming. And now the earlier dates are widely accepted. The only problem is with these early dates is that they predate when that ice corridor appeared in Beringia.
So people must have arrived in the Americas via a different route. This brings us to theory number two, the coastal route. According to this theory, people arrived in the Americas during the height of the last ice age, when a land route would have been impossible. They did so by using small boats and following the coast. They likely survived by exploiting coastal resources such as fish, edible plants, and hunting birds and animals.
Evidence for this route, however, is difficult to come by. Part of the problem is that water levels have changed so much since the last ice age. Much of the original coastline, where one would expect to find remains of human habitation, is now underwater. Water levels rose so much when the ice sheets melted that they would have destroyed any evidence for the coastal route. However, more evidence has now come to light which supports the coastal theory, and it is now widely accepted.
What you're looking at here is fossilized human corporalite. That is, fossilized human poo. It was found in the Paisley Five Mile Point caves in Oregon. During the last ice age, these caves would have been very close to the coast. Radiocarbon dating puts these corporalites, or human poo, At 14,300 years ago, so before the ice corridor opened up, it further lends support for the coastal route theory.
When we combine physical archaeological evidence with evidence from DNA, the picture becomes much more precise. It is clear that the Americas were populated by successive waves of human migration, the earliest of which might have happened around 35. thousand years ago. The first peoples would have certainly arrived via boats along the coast. As the ice age ended, more people arrived over land, and humans spread out to cover both continents.
As the water levels rose, the Americas were mostly cut off from the old world. As the world warmed up, humans migrated into the interior of the continent, moving northward into areas which had previously been covered by ice. Around 500 BCE to around 500 CE, the Caribbean islands had also been reached by humans from the mainland. One of the last migrations into the Americas would have been the Inuit, who moved into the northern reaches of modern-day Canada around 1,000 years ago from Siberia.
The isolated islands of the Pacific would take longer and come from a completely different source in Southeast Asia. Oceania was settled beginning around 7,000 years ago. with the last islands being reached only about 800 years ago.
Thus, we arrive at the millennia of adaptations. Human ingenuity had allowed us to conquer every climatic region and corner of the world, from the Inuit in the high arctic, to the Maya civilization in Central America, to the Polynesian peoples in Hawaii, separated by over 1,800 miles of open ocean. People had reached and conquered them all. In time, agriculture too was discovered in the New World, just as it had been in the Old. The earliest evidence for farming is found in Central and Southern Mexico, and in Peru.
The slow process of domesticating crops might have begun as early as 9 or 8,000 years ago, but clear evidence doesn't really appear until much later, around 4,000 years ago. One of the first plants domesticated was a wild grass. which was incredibly similar to what happened in the old world with the precursors of wheat and barley. However, the grass domesticated in the Americas was teosinte, which would eventually become corn, the most widely grown staple in the world today. The indigenous peoples of the Americas domesticated different plants, because there were different wild plants growing in the Americas than that of the old world.
Thus, from the Americas, we get the first corn, The first peppers, the first tomatoes, the first potatoes, and my personal favorite, the cacao plant, better known as chocolate. When you think about just how popular and widespread these vegetables are today, it's amazing that the rest of the world has only been getting to know them for about 500 years. Thus, although tomatoes are central to Italian cuisine today, no Italian had ever tasted a tomato before the 16th century, nor had anyone from India tasted a tomato or a potato for that matter until around the same time.
These were the crops of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. By around 3000 BCE, farming and village life was firmly established in parts of Central and South America. The earliest known pottery dates from the Andean coast.
By around 1800 BCE, pottery making had spread to central and southern Mexico. Cotton textiles and clothing dating to around 3000 BCE have been found along the coast of Ecuador and Peru. Eventually, the agricultural revolution in the Americas would lead to cities and civilizations, just as it had in the old world. One of the oldest cities detected was in the Sepe River Valley in Peru, where pyramid-shaped temples, plazas, and a wide variety of different dwellings have been unearthed.
Carbon dating has shown this city to be flourishing around 2627 BCE. making this city contemporary with the early Mesopotamian cities in the Middle East and the Great Pyramids in Egypt. In Central America, which is sometimes called Mesoamerica, the earliest permanent settlements date from around 1800 BCE.
The first important Mesoamerican urban civilization was the Olmec, who flourished at what is now known as San Lorenzo on the Gulf of Mexico between 1500 and 400 BCE. However, they are also one of the most mysterious. We know, relatively speaking, very little about them.
We don't even know what they called themselves. The name Olmec is in fact a much later name given to them by the Aztecs, more than a thousand years after they had disappeared. Part of the mystery surrounding the Olmec is due to the fact that their symbolic writing system has never been successfully decoded.
Yet the Olmec are generally considered the forerunner of all subsequent Mesoamerican cultures, such as the Maya and the Aztecs. Centered in the Gulf of Mexico, their influence spread throughout Mesoamerica, even reaching as far south as present-day Nicaragua. Monumental sacred complexes, massive stone sculptures, ball games, and even chocolate drinking are all believed to have been features of Olmec culture, which were passed on.
to the cultures that followed. The most striking visible legacy of the Olmec civilization must be the colossal stone heads they produced. These heads were carved in balsit rock and might have been portraits of actual rulers. The heads can be nearly three meters high and eight tons in weight and the stone from which they were worked on was in some cases transported 80 kilometers or more.
Farming would spread to other parts of the Americas too. However, farming did not always mean a completely settled way of life. In many places, farming was just one of many strategies employed throughout the year.
For example, in the area of the Great Lakes or the St. Lawrence Lowlands, the area where Sheridan College is situated today, what is modern-day Ontario, Quebec, and northern New York State, Indigenous peoples lived in semi-permanent farming communities. In palisaded villages, they farmed corn, squash, and beans. However, farming only formed part of their diet, and hunting was still an important way of life.
Across the Americas, we see how humans used available resources and strategies which best fit the local environment. Where farming could be naturally adapted, it spread. However, in other places less suitable for farming, such as the Arctic, or the dense forests and cold climate of the Canadian Shield, or the sweltering jungles of the Amazonian rainforests, hunting and gathering remained the ideal way of life. Other places, such as the interior plains, where abundant animal resources, such as the bison, made farming, well, redundant. Indeed, one must remember that while the interior plains today are important agricultural centers, they are also naturally prone to drought and very cold in the winter.
Without modern irrigation and farming techniques, they are very difficult to farm. And why would you need to if there's already plenty of food in the form of bison? And so this is true of both the old world and the new. Farming changes the lives of many people, but not everywhere was it adopted. And as such, settled societies and eventually civilization tended to happen where farming was easiest.
With respect to the civilizations of the Americas, a few words should be said about some of the major differences between their development compared to the civilizations of the Old World, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. One is the relative lack of the domestication of animals in the Americas. Unlike Eurasia and Africa, the majority of large mammals had died out after the last ice age, with the result being that there weren't any animals that lived in the Americas. really any pack or riding animals of sufficient size left to be domesticated.
Thus the Americas had no horses or cattle until first contact with Europeans in the 16th century. Domesticated dogs existed. The Inuit and other indigenous people made extensive use of dogs as both pets and working animals. Other domestic animals included the llama, alpaca, and turkey. But overall, the lack of domesticated animals raised for meat meant that hunting and fishing everywhere still remained important sources for food.
Now I would like to turn to the peopling of the thousands of islands of Oceania. The area we call Oceania forms a huge triangle bordered by Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island, or known as Rapa Nui in the Polynesian language. In many ways, the populating of these islands must rank as one of human beings'greatest feats. Unlike the relatively close islands of the Caribbean, the distances between the island groups in the Pacific could be incredibly vast and sometimes span thousands of kilometers. These migrations were made possible by the development of sophisticated sailing technology, which would not be equaled by Europeans for hundreds and hundreds of years later.
Their boats consisted of sail-and paddle-driven ocean-going canoes, stabilized with outriggers or double hulls. Using linguistic analysis, modern scholars have theorized that the people of Oceania are at least partially related to Taiwan's indigenous population. Approximately 6,000 years ago, seafaring people left Taiwan and spread out, settling in the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Malay Peninsula.
In later times, the descendants of these settlers, all speakers of languages of the same family, spread further into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In the Indian Ocean, they sailed as far west as Madagascar. the island off the east coast of Africa, arriving around 200 CE. In the east, around 1600 BCE, they sailed to the islands of Polynesia, Micronesia, and the rest of Oceania, reaching Hawaii around 600 CE, Easter Island around 700 CE, and New Zealand around 1200 CE.
By the time the first Europeans arrived in the 16th century, every inhabitable island had been settled, and some, Hawaii and New Zealand for example, had populations of many hundreds of thousands. Well, that's it for today. In our next lecture podcast, we'll be beginning a new module, The Age of Empires and Religious Civilizations, from 600 BCE to 1300 CE.
In our first unit of module 2, we'll be looking at early civilizations in Africa and the Americas. In Africa, we'll see the rise of kingdoms and farming communities and cities in both the Sahara, Nile Valley, and Ethiopian highlands. In the Americas, we'll look as civilization develops further with the rise of the Maya kingdoms and civilizations in the Andes.
Until next time, on Intersections of World History.