North america
At sometime between 40,000 and 10,000 B.C. human hunting groups occupied all the main land masses of earth except Antarctica. Men reached America about 20,000 B.C. (perhaps earlier) from Asia over a land bridge between Asia and Alaska, varying from three hundred to one thousand miles wide and apparently including the Aleutian Islands where blades and burins, perhaps dating back to 10,000 B.C. have been found. Otherwise the earliest known cultures of the American far north have not been well dated
Trager (Ref.
222 ) even states that racemization tests on bone suggest that Neanderthal man may have been on the west coast of the western hemisphere at 50,000 B.C., but we have not seen confirmation from any other author and Trager does not reveal his source material.
. The so-called British Mountain Culture near the Yukon Arctic coast is probably the oldest, with artifacts of eastern Siberia, including crude instruments and shaping tools. There, in the Old Crow Basin, the first known occupation site in the New World has been tentatively carbon-dated to 25,000 B.C. The inhabitants were skilled users of bone, using mammoth and horse bone, the latter animals ranging in size from ponies to Percherons. Jaws of domesticated dogs appear to be 30,000 years old. At any rate, the people who came over the land bridge apparently simply followed their prey animals and were of a basic, general Mongoloid stock with skulls not much different from Caucasians and their descendants became the American Indians. The tools and skills spread from Asia to America with them and included the stone adze, spoons, combs of bone or horn, the toggle harpoon and eventually the bow and arrow. Marshack (Ref.
130 ) says the American Indians came in waves from Asia over a period of perhaps 20,000 years with some as late as 2,000 B.C. The latter figure is not further explained. We know that the land bridge was present off and on over several millennia, but never as late as 2,000 B.C. It is interesting that as late as 1962 this theory of the Asiatic origin of the American aborigines was not universally accepted. Greeman (Ref.
78 ) was committed to diffusion across the north Atlantic in skin-covered boats in the Upper Paleolithic times. He felt that Sandia Culture material in America was the same as the Solutrean of the Montaut site in southwest France. Blood typing studies beginning with Boyd (Ref.
17 ) in 1963 probably laid this theory to rest.
The great bulk of the people coming over the Bering land bridge may not have been able to migrate down into the region of the United States and farther south until about 12,000 years ago when the ice that had previously almost covered Canada finally melted enough to open a corridor east of the Rockies, at which time the Mongoloid hunters poured through to the gamelands of the American plains. Dr. Knut Fladmark (as quoted by Canby [Ref.
22 ]) of British Columbia argues that some men could have come south when the corridor was closed by leapfrogging down the coast where there were many ice-free pockets, by boat. Furthermore, recent work shows positively that much of the coast line and island archipelago off the coast of southern Alaska was never covered by glaciers at any time. (Ref.
239 )
