We are confident in our knowledge of where man came from to the New World and how he was able to make the trip. We are on less certain ground, however, when we try to determine when he arrived. Estimates have varied widely, changing with every increase in our knowledge. From the first enthusiastic attempts to fit the Indian into the Old Stone Age chronology which was just then unfolding for the Old World, the cold reasoning of skeptical scientists brought down the maximum age of human occupation of this hemisphere to something like 3,000 years. Beginning in 1925, however, a series of finds has provided unquestionable evidence that men using very distinctive weapons were living on this continent, largely by hunting the mammoth and a great bison, both now extinct, during the period when the ice was receding for the last time. The typical channeled or fluted spear point of this people has even been found lately along the northern Alaska coast. So, while we still cannot say that this characteristic artifact was brought from Asia rather than being developed here in America, it is at least an interesting coincidence that man hunted large and now extinct game in Alaska in areas where conditions were at times particularly well suited to his immigration.
Other evidence shows that the users of this telltale point were not the first to live in the region of the western plains; at least some of their numbers had been preceded by men whose stone work was almost as unusual and equally easy to identify. Recently developed methods of dating by the use of radioactive carbon-14 show that the span of time when the channeled point users, Folsom man, roamed the Plains included one date of about 8000 B. C. For his predecessors, we feel justified in pushing this date a good 2,000 or 3,000 years further back; and there are even hints taken quite seriously by leading archeologists that man was here many thousands of years before that. We know that the great climatic swings marking the principal stages of the Pleistocene Epoch were actually composed of repeated lesser pulsations. Like a mighty pump, the changing climate worked upon all life within thousands of miles of the shifting ice fronts, driving it southward with icy winds and then sucking it back toward the north as cold and damp were replaced by heat and drought. Man followed the game; and this, rather than any planned migration, probably accounts for the wide spread of his earliest remains.
American Indians, then, are most closely related to the present inhabitants of eastern Asia, where they, too, had their origin. They came to this country as its first human inhabitants some 12,000 to 15,000 years ago at the very least. They did not come all at once, or even in one limited period of time, but probably in a fairly continuous succession of small hunting bands following the game. Their earliest migrations hither were doubtless the indirect result of great fluctuations in climate which marked the coming and going of the ice during the glacial age; and it was the peculiar conditions existing about the present region of Bering Strait that encouraged them to explore the now accessible region to the east. Once they had reached the New World, their hunting travels probably carried them back and forth in both directions so that a knowledge of the seemingly limitless territory beyond became fairly general.
Broken Clovis point and sharp-cornered scrapers from Ocmulgee excavations. Point length 3¹¹/₁₆ inches. Artist’s reconstruction of point at left.
The disappearance of the land bridge must have been very gradual by human standards. Successive generations would have found the journey increasingly difficult, but this would only have led to the adoption of other measures such as waiting for winter ice or the use of rafts or boats to cross the widening stretches of open water. Once arrived, they began to spread out over the country, moving on as the game became scarce to where it was more abundant, looking for new and unpeopled areas whenever they began to catch sight too often of members of other bands hunting the same territory. Not many years would be needed to cover the vast expanse of the two continents. With movements of only 20 or 30 miles each year, it might have happened in as little as a dozen generations; but we can say for sure that man had reached southern Patagonia by about 6000 B. C., possibly far earlier. By then, we may assume, the new homeland had been explored with some thoroughness; and portions of it had already been inhabited for thousands of years. It was by no means filled up; but many of its potentialities were known, and American Indians were well started on their own peculiar course of development.
Man Comes to Georgia
The roving existence led by these Wandering Hunters brought them into the region which is now Georgia at a relatively early date. We do not know by what route they came here, for it is easier to seek out the geographic limitations which restricted the first migrants to the New World to a single point of entry than it is to trace the wanderings of their descendants over some 8,000,000 square miles of North America. Nevertheless, we are beginning to get a few hints.
Mammoth Hunters, from Museum exhibit panel.