The period between 15,000 and 12,000
years ago was an ideal time for a crossing into
North America, because the global limate was slowly warming and the glaciers were in gradual retreat, sufficiently so to permit an easier passage into the continent but not yet so far as entirely to refill the Bering Strait with water.
The first
people who trekked into Alaska had no notion that they were discovering and colonizing a
new continent, nor that they were crossing a land bridge that would subsequently vanish beneath the rising Pacific Ocean. As the icecap receded over the centuries, the migrants found it easier to spread southward and eastward into North America and beyond. As the land bridge submerged, migration from Siberia became more difficult, but not impossible for people possessing small boats made from animal skins stretched over a wooden framework. At its narrowest, the Bering Strait is only three miles wide.
Contemporary Native Americans who speak and Athabascan language descended from a second pulse of emigrants who arrived about 10,000 to 8,000 years ago. Settling first in subartic Alaska and northwestern Canada, some Athabascan bands gradually worked their way down the Rocky Mountains, reaching the American southwest about 600 years ago. These people later became known as the Navajo and Apache.
A thirs surge of colonization began about 5,000 years ago and featured the ancestors of the Inuit (or Eskimos) and Aleut. The Aleut settled the Aleutian islands southwest of Alaska, while their Inuit cousins gradually expanded eastward along the Arctic coasts of northern Alaska and Canada, reaching Labrador and Greenland by about 2,500 years ago.
#2 COLONIZERS The stunning expansion of European power, wealth and knowledge would have seemed improbable in 1400, when the Europeans were a parochial set of peoples preoccupied with internal and interminable wars. Europe was also slowly recovering from a devastating epidemic of bubonic plague, known as the Black Death, which during the 1340s had killed about a third of the population. European Christians felt hemmed in by the superior wealth, power and technology possessed by their rivals and neighbors the Muslims, who subscribed to Islam, the world''s other great expansionist faith. Dominated by the Ottoman Turks, the Muslim realms extended across North Africa and around the southern and eastern Mediterranean Sea to embrace the Balkans, the Near East, Central Asia and Southeast Asia.
15th century Christians felt beleagured, on the losing end of a struggle for the future of humanity. The Turkish capture of Constantinople and advance created in Europe a powerful sense of geographic and religious claustrophobia, which generated a profound longing to break out and circumvent the Muslim world. Contrary to popular myth, 15th century European intellectuals and rulers did not think that the
world was flat. What deterred Europeans from saling due west for Asia was not a fear of sailing off the edge of the world but, instead, their surprisingly accurate understanding that the globe was too large. Breaking with geographic orthodoxy, Columbus dared the westward trip to Asia because he underestimated the world''s circumference as only 18,000 miles, which placed Japan a mere 3,500 miles west of Europe.
Columbus was fortunate indeed that the unexpected Americas loomed at about the 3000-mile mark to provide fresh water and provisions before his men mutinied. It is one of the ironies of world history that profound misunderstanding set in motion Columbus''s discoveries. Native Americans had developed certain wild plants into domesticated hybrids that were more productive than their Old World counterparts. By introducing the New World crops to the Old World, the colonizers dramatically expanded the food supply and their population. In Europe, maize and potatoesndowed farmers with larger yields on smaller plots, which benefthe poorest peasants. During the 18th century, the potrst gained its close association with Ireland, and Irish numbers grew from 3 million in 1750 to 5.25 million in 1800.
The Irish then became vulnerable to any blight then devastated their potato crop. When such a blight struck furing the 1840s, thousands starved to death and millions fled overseas, primarily to North America. In microcosm and exaggerated form, Ireland tells a common European story. The colonizers brought along plants and animals new to the Americas, some by design and others by accident... the remaking of the Americas was a team effort by a set of interdependent species led and partially managed (but never fully controlled) by European people.
#3 NEW SPAIN Although important advantages, the technology and animals of European war were not sufficient to overcome the far larger numbers of proud and defiant Indian warriors. But the Spanish evened the odds by finding local allies in subordinated Indian peoples who resented the dominant native people in each region. But the Spaniards'' greatest single advantage came from their unintentional and microscopic allies: the pathogens of diseases new to the Indians. Such weakened people could put up little resistance. The feats of the conquistadores seem superhuman because, in the world of Alfred W. Crosby Jnr., ''they were just that - the triumphs of teams that included more than humans''.
The introduction of firearms revolutionized Indian warfare as the natives recognised the uselessness of wooden armour and the folly of massed formations. Throughout the northeast, the Indians shifted to hit-and-run raids and relied on trees for cover from gunfire. They also clamored, with increasing success, for their own guns as the price of trade.
More summaries about the History Wars: The Enola Gay And Other Battles For The American Past