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Documentary, The True Ancient Origins Of The Native Americans 1491 Before Columbus
#NativeAmericans #Americans #Documentary #Columbus
#NativeAmericans #Americans #Documentary #Columbus
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00:00This channel is part of the History Hit Network.
00:03Stick around to find out more.
00:07We have been here from the beginning.
00:15Our ancestors navigated by the wind and stars,
00:20crossing vast oceans and mountain ranges,
00:25searching for new lands.
00:26Over thousands of years,
00:30our ancestors became astronomers and architects,
00:35philosophers and scientists,
00:38artists and inventors.
00:41We created distinct societies
00:44and built vast trade systems that covered two continents.
00:50In 1492, our world was changed forever.
00:55But we did not disappear.
00:59Today, the languages and teachings of our ancestors remain.
01:04And these are the untold stories of the Americas before Columbus.
01:19When did the first people arrive in the Americas?
01:24Indigenous creation stories tell how our ancestors emerged as humans from the earth,
01:30the water, the sky, and the land below.
01:33Some people believe that we walked into the Americas on foot across an ancient land bridge
01:40that once connected Asia and North America.
01:44Others say we paddled here in ocean-going canoes along the Pacific coastline.
01:51There's one thing that all of these views of arrival have in common.
01:55They all begin with a journey.
02:00By 1491, tens of millions of indigenous people were living in every part of the Americas,
02:07from the high Arctic to the southern tip of South America.
02:12There were countless indigenous nations,
02:15each with their own distinct language and ways of life.
02:19But this didn't happen overnight.
02:21It took thousands of years to build this diverse world
02:25from a very small founding population.
02:30Since 1492, we've shared our traditional territory
02:33with people from every part of the world.
02:38Today, we continue our search for the origins of our ancestors
02:42and the roots of our cultural identity as indigenous people.
02:53We have two different kinds of dates.
02:55We have the archaeological date that says probably somewhere between 18,000 to 20,000 years ago
03:03the first non-native-born human came into this hemisphere.
03:09In terms of indigenous perspectives, we've always been here.
03:14Philosophically, we've never been anywhere else.
03:17Every indigenous nation has its own creation story.
03:21These stories have been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years.
03:27Creation stories form a powerful part of each nation's identity
03:33and our sense of who we are as a people.
03:41In the beginning, there was a great flood.
03:45A few animals and birds survived by clinging to a log.
03:49Among them was the tiny muskrat.
03:52The creatures decided they needed to find land,
03:55but the world was covered in water.
03:58One by one, they took turns diving deep into the water,
04:02looking for some dirt to bring back to the surface.
04:05But each animal came back empty-handed.
04:09Finally, the tiny muskrat dove under the water.
04:13When he came back, he had a paw full of earth.
04:17He placed it on the back of a turtle shell.
04:19This is how North America became known as Turtle Island.
04:26In the beginning, there was only the sea and sky.
04:31The gods created the earth and populated it with animals and birds.
04:37But the animals couldn't worship them, so they decided to make humans.
04:42The first humans were made from mud, but they fell apart too easily.
04:48Then the gods made humans from wood, but they had nothing in their minds,
04:53so they destroyed them in a flood.
04:56Finally, the gods made humans out of maize dough.
05:00They had intelligence and knowledge, and could worship the gods.
05:04So they became the first people.
05:12In the beginning, people lived in the sky,
05:15and the only creatures they knew were birds.
05:18A young hunter set out one day to find a rare and beautiful bird.
05:24When he finally found it, he shot his arrow.
05:27And when he went to retrieve it, he discovered a hole in the bottom of the sky.
05:32Looking through it, he saw forests and rivers and wild animals.
05:37He asked the other hunters to travel to this world with him, but they refused.
05:43So he made a rope and lowered it down the hole and climbed down to the world below.
05:49He shot a deer and brought it back to the sky world.
05:53The others wanted to hunt deer too, so they climbed down the rope.
05:58The last person to go through the hole in the sky was a woman,
06:02and she became stuck, preventing the people from returning to their home.
06:07She can still be seen in the sky as the morning star.
06:15She can still be seen in the sky.
06:16Historians have long supported a theory that our ancestors walked into the Americas
06:21across an ancient land bridge that connected Asia and North America during the last ice age.
06:29Until about 13,000 years ago, great sheets of ice kilometers thick
06:35covered much of the northern sections of North America, Europe, and Asia.
06:42But there were some ice-free regions in the northern hemisphere where people lived.
06:48One of these regions was known as Beringia.
06:53This thousand kilometer expanse of land connecting the two continents emerged when glaciers locked up
06:59vast quantities of water, causing sea levels to fall more than 100 meters.
07:05You see evidence that people came across a land bridge. You see evidence that a land bridge did exist in
07:11the past.
07:12In the northern parts of North America, Alaska, the Yukon, even northern British Columbia,
07:18we have a collection of some of the most ancient sites across the continent.
07:23And of course, that would be up in an area that archaeologists refer to as Beringia.
07:29And you know, those people who made it across the land bridge, all they had were their wits and a
07:35few stone tools.
07:36And yet they managed to explore, discover, and colonize two continents. So that's a pretty amazing
07:43achievement in the annals of human history. And they did this by being very aware of their environment,
07:49of being able to manipulate their environment to their own benefit.
07:53The water between the two continents dropped so low, it exposed the bottom of the sea.
07:59This arid, prairie-like landscape remained ice-free, and the abundant birds and mammals provided people
08:06with food and materials for clothing and shelter. But Beringia was a temporary landscape.
08:13Around 20,000 years ago, the world's climate began to warm, and the glaciers started melting.
08:21By 15,000 years ago, the rising sea levels had covered up the Beringia land bridge,
08:27and people living there either had to return to Siberia or stay in North America.
08:33The melting glaciers and rising sea levels created major environmental changes in the northern hemisphere.
08:41The land between the two North American ice sheets widened about 12,000 years ago,
08:47offering an ice-free corridor for people to travel through.
08:51Historically in archaeology, it was believed that the spread further south into the continent
08:57was between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets, and this is known as the ice-free corridor hypothesis.
09:04And so many researchers are saying this was the gateway into the Americas.
09:13But taking this route south through such a harsh terrain would have involved a tremendous risk.
09:21If they had a people who were up in Alaska, and they see this opening between two ice sheets,
09:27they're taking a big leap of faith to say, well, maybe we go a thousand miles south of here,
09:32we'll find better land.
09:35The ice-free corridor would have been a very dynamic landscape.
09:39It would have had terrible winters, like harsh, cold winters, and not much better in the summer.
09:45The summers would have been cold and rainy.
09:46So there wasn't a lot of opportunity for people to find stable land that they could colonize.
09:57The end of the last ice age set the stage for the movement of people overland into North America.
10:04The indigenous people who traveled into the continent on foot from Beringia could not have known it at the time,
10:11but they were not the first people to settle south of the ice sheets.
10:15In fact, humans had already been living in both North and South America for thousands of years
10:21before the glaciers melted and opened up routes south through the ice-free corridor.
10:38Glaciers covered much of the northern hemisphere until about 12,000 years ago.
10:43As temperatures warmed worldwide, ice melted and sea levels began to rise.
10:48These changes to the environment led to animal,
10:50bird, and human migration throughout North America, Asia, and Europe.
10:57Tens of thousands of years ago, the climates in parts of the Asian subcontinent was much wetter than it is
11:02today.
11:03In India, the Thar Desert was once a vast, fertile grassland.
11:08Hunters following the herds eventually settled permanently in the region.
11:20As the glaciers retreated, the warming climate created new agricultural zones in the northern hemisphere.
11:27Early agriculturalists cultivated new food resources in the fertile soils of the Middle East,
11:33and this led to the formation of farming settlements and eventually cities.
11:46During the last ice age, sea levels were 100 meters lower than they were today,
11:51and this created a thousand kilometer wide land bridge to appear between Siberia and Alaska.
11:57This became one of the migration routes that humans took into the Americas.
12:05Changes in climate over the millennia has influenced the migration paths
12:10and hunting practices of humans throughout the world.
12:22When they first started doing their surveys in the, uh, what would be the ice-free corridor,
12:29the observation they made was that the sites were getting younger as they went north,
12:34which is counterintuitive. You'd expect that the oldest sites would be in the north and they'd
12:38get progressively younger in the south. So it looked like people were moving north instead of south.
12:44So this has always been very paradoxical, and the only way you can explain it is that there were people
12:50already living south of the ice sheets, and where did those people come from?
12:54The recent discovery of an ancient village and campsites in the Americas that are more than 14,000 years old
13:01supports a new theory that people first arrived by boat along the Pacific coastline of North and South America.
13:10In the 70s, researchers proposed an alternative hypothesis to say that the coastal route was also viable,
13:19and this sparked a huge debate in archaeology that it had to be one or the other. Which one was
13:25it?
13:26We're now coming to an understanding that it was likely both happened. However, archaeologists are more leaning
13:33towards the coastal route as the earlier alternative.
13:37Any journey along the Pacific coast during the ice age would have been treacherous.
13:44Keep in mind that the west coast at that time
13:46would have been choked with icebergs and lots of ice flows. So for people to travel that way,
13:54they would certainly require some good ocean-going skills. And that's not out of the question,
14:00because we do know from the archaeological record in East Asia that as early as 40,000 years ago,
14:08people were able to make open ocean voyages. When people go on journeys like this, their destination
14:18is usually unknown to them. We may never know what compelled indigenous people to embark on this
14:26treacherous journey by sea. What is the history of humanity in North America?
14:33We have indications that humans were here. They were producing culture. They were burying their dead.
14:39They were becoming a part of the landscape. They were taking ownership of the landscape in their own way.
14:49Once arriving on land, these seafarers would have found themselves in a strange and foreign world,
14:55world-filled with unknown peril and promise. When people are traveling into unknown countries,
15:02they really have to rely on the skills that they bring with them. And so if they know how to
15:07live off
15:07the land, if they know what seafoods they can consume, this will give them a better than average
15:12chance of surviving any new country or new terrain that they're starting to settle in.
15:21The idea of where we come from is extremely important. It gives us that sense of place. It tells us
15:28the
15:29locations that we are tied to both as a people, as individuals. It's the part of the landscape that
15:35continues to reside in our bones, in our blood, but particularly in our minds.
15:45It's not known how many indigenous people arrived in the Americas by water, but evidence suggests this
15:53was not an isolated occurrence. Archaeology keeps finding more and more localities which add pieces to
16:01the puzzle. When we look at them all in a very broad picture, it does give us that story, that
16:07deeply
16:08complex story about the first people to come into North America.
16:11North America.
16:29Oh, some are not there. We not are such.
16:33Let's go.
17:04Let's go.
17:33Let's go.
18:11Let's go.
18:13Let's go.
19:03Let's go.
19:32Let's go.
20:01Let's go.
20:16Let's go.
20:45Let's go.
21:15Let's go.
22:00Let's go.
22:45Let's go.
22:52Let's go.
23:45Let's go.
24:00Let's go.
24:03Let's go.
24:08Let's go.
24:14Let's go.
24:46Let's go.
24:46Let's go.
24:56Let's go.
24:59Let's go.
25:00Let's go.
25:10Let's go.
25:43Let's go.
25:43Let's go.
25:43Let's go.
25:43And, of course, as people moved into the farther north regions,
25:48they started coming across animals like, such as reindeer and caribou.
25:54And these are herding animals, so they started hunting them communally.
26:01Clovis tools were very lethal, and whatever they hit would have been injured.
26:06But, of course, you'd have to be very close to that animal.
26:09You bring them into natural traps, and then once they're into the natural traps,
26:13and then you can use your stabbing spears to kill them.
26:21Stones and animal bones were the first materials used by humans
26:25to craft tools for hunting.
26:27Some of the earliest tools to be discovered date back more than 2 million years.
26:3820,000 years ago, nomadic hunter-gatherers
26:41lived in the Qabara cave region in Israel.
26:44They developed the Qabaran tool technology
26:47using flint to make spear points and arrowheads.
27:03The Solutrean tool industry emerged in Western Europe around 19,000 years ago.
27:09The people of this region made tools by napping tiny flakes off the flint core.
27:14Hunters also used heat to make the flaking more precise.
27:31One of the earliest stone tool technologies in North America was the Clovis Point,
27:36named after the site in New Mexico where the spear points were first discovered.
27:41The people who created these tools hunted a wide range of megafauna, including mammoths.
27:49Throughout the world, the different styles of tools that people developed
27:53determined the type and size of the game they hunted.
27:58As our ancestors settled throughout the two continents,
28:01creating hundreds of nations,
28:03languages evolved and diversified.
28:06And through these languages came stronger social and cultural identities.
28:12The Western Hemisphere is the most linguistically diverse region in the world.
28:18It's estimated that there were as many as 2,000 distinct languages spoken in the Americas in 1491.
28:26Each of these languages are part of a language family,
28:29connected through common words, grammar and diction.
28:40Languages are more than a means of communication.
28:43For ancient societies, they contain the cultural, historical and traditional knowledge of a nation.
28:52Many of the languages spoken before 1491 are still in use today.
29:02Check out.
29:07Quechua in South America.
29:11Mayan in Mesoamerica.
29:24Pueblo in North America.
29:56Mesoamerican cultures like the Maya and Aztec had a complex writing system, but most indigenous
30:05languages were based on an oral tradition.
30:08Language doesn't leave marks on the land.
30:11Language isn't a thing that we can point to in the world.
30:14It's something that is done by people.
30:16And especially without writing, all you have are people as your evidence.
30:21In North America, there's a very complex tapestry of different language families that have crossed
30:25over each other.
30:26And there's probably about 30 families in North America.
30:29There's probably another 30 or so families in Central America and maybe even 100 families
30:34in South America.
30:36The original work on comparative linguistics was reconstructing languages that had long written
30:41histories like English and the Romance languages like French and Italian.
30:45So it was early on believed, no, you simply couldn't do that in a language that didn't
30:50have a written history.
30:51The early anthropologist linguists in North America proved that, yes, you could.
30:56You could reconstruct these languages and often could show materially that language here was
31:02actually a close relative of a language that was quite far apart from it, separated by a
31:06number of others.
31:08They applied these methods that had been developed in Europe and proved that they could be used
31:13for unwritten languages.
31:14And that opened the door for people to work on Native American languages and figure out
31:20where did they come from, which is always the question that presses a lot of people when
31:25they study us.
31:27They also found sometimes that the indigenous people themselves would tell you, oh, well,
31:33our language is actually related to those guys over there.
31:35I mean, you can ask and you find out, well, yes, we share a whole bunch of words in common.
31:39And you go talk to them, you can tell.
31:41And although they can't really communicate in each person's language, they still find quite
31:45a large number of words that are similar.
31:48Indigenous languages carry deep cultural and traditional knowledge.
31:52But tracing their histories is a challenge to linguistic researchers.
31:57Even though we have reconstructions, internally reconstructed and externally reconstructed language
32:02families, we can show that they're related, but we can't go back any further.
32:07And that's because unlike biology, language doesn't have a constant rate of change.
32:12It changes in fits and starts with long periods of little change, sudden dramatic reconstructions
32:19of how the language works.
32:20It's not something that we can predict with any reliability.
32:26We can show that a language is internally related, but we can't tell you how long the connections
32:31are.
32:32And we rely almost entirely on archaeology to give us some sort of calibration to our guesstimate.
32:39Oral entomology is both fluid and fragile.
32:43And of the thousands of indigenous languages that existed in the Americas in 1491, hundreds
32:49have been lost forever.
32:51The exact question of when all these languages came here, as far as linguistics can tell,
32:56they've just been here.
33:09Archaeological sites in every part of the world tell the story of ancient peoples and the cultures
33:15cultures and civilizations they created over thousands of years.
33:25Archaeology is one of the first major cities in the world that featured monumental stone buildings.
33:30It was built at the center of a vast trade network in the Middle East.
33:515,000 years ago, Egypt was divided into upper and lower regions.
33:55A pharaoh named Narmer created a unified kingdom.
33:59And there are sites throughout Egypt that represent the artistic achievements from this era.
34:20Cahokia was the largest urban center in North America 1,000 years ago.
34:24It was part of an elaborate intertribal trade network that connected people as far away as
34:30the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes.
34:35The archaeological record in every part of the world continues to inform us of the accomplishments
34:41and ways of life of our ancestors.
34:45Indigenous people settled in every region of the Western Hemisphere, from the high Arctic,
34:51to the Caribbean islands, to the southern tip of South America.
34:56Historians estimate that by 1491, the population of the Americas may have been as high as a hundred
35:03million people.
35:05Population growth in societies worldwide can be traced to the advent of agriculture.
35:10As people began to grow annual crops, the need to travel to find food lessened.
35:16Villages grew into towns, and towns into cities, with the farmers providing a steady supply of food.
35:23The impact over thousands of years was a significant growth of population in the Americas.
35:30Throughout the Americas, civilizations rose and fell like an oscillating frontier through time.
35:36Some of them had great periods of development, innovation.
35:40Their technologies were among the most incredible, their populations were significant, and then they collapsed.
35:46Archaeologically, we're looking at a palimpsest.
35:48In other words, we're looking at layers and pieces and fragments.
35:51It's like looking at a wall of graffiti and seeing one layer on top of another, on top of another,
35:56on top of another.
35:56And when an archaeologist digs, he may be digging through ten different layers.
36:00Or she may be recovering the relics of maybe ten civilizations.
36:05An example of a significant population surge was the Aztec city-state of Tenochtitlan.
36:12Founded in 1325 on a man-made island where present-day Mexico City now stands, it was the capital of
36:19the Aztec Empire.
36:20The city had a complex social strata that included the working class, military members, priests, and the elites.
36:28It was a vibrant city with a bustling marketplace.
36:31At its peak, Tenochtitlan was home to more than 250,000 people and was the center of an empire with
36:40a population of between two and three million.
36:43In 1491, Tenochtitlan was the largest city in the Americas.
36:48The question then is, what about North America?
36:52The Mississippian side of Cahokia was a center that maintained significant populations into the tens of thousands.
36:59Cahokia was arguably the largest and most influential urban center in North America before 1491.
37:06At its peak around 800 years ago, Cahokia had a population of 40,000 or more.
37:12The city's strategic location, where the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers meet, made it a natural gateway for intertribal trade.
37:21But over time, like the major cities in Mesoamerica, Cahokia also disappeared.
37:28We have factors like drought, we have warfare, we have invasion and conquest.
37:33All of these things factor into the variable landscape of demography and population in the Americas.
37:42Indigenous archaeologists are much more adept at thinking about the who of the past and the why of the past,
37:49rather than just the what of the material culture.
37:52It's not just a piece of pottery that happened here without humans being involved in either transportation
37:58and breaking it and moving it from one place to another.
38:02And I think that's what drives a lot of good archaeologists is recognizing that we're not in it for the
38:08artifacts,
38:09we're in it for the stories that the artifacts compose.
38:11One of the most important things about being an indigenous person involved in archaeology is knowing
38:18the importance of story, the importance of the individual, and knowing how these all fit within who we are today.
38:29There are so many tribal people involved in trying to relate the history of individual tribes, individual places.
38:37In the past, it has been perceived to be the role of the expert to tell what the history is,
38:43the history of place,
38:44and it's often has been based on someone else's stories, some written reports or such.
38:49Now it's extremely important that indigenous groups have the authenticity, the authority,
38:56and the right to present the history as they know it.
39:01There are so many indigenous people who are getting advanced degrees, who are getting recognized as authority,
39:07and so now they're able to take that and tell the stories that their communities want them to tell,
39:13so that people outside of the community can really understand what has gone before.
39:22The sequencing of the human genome has led to many significant discoveries about the migration
39:28and ways of life of ancient peoples throughout the world.
39:38Ancient Egyptians believed that the soul remained with the human body after a person died.
39:44Egyptian rulers and their families were buried in tombs with gold, tools, food, and animals
39:50to help them on their journey to the afterlife.
40:05The Kavzah Cave in Israel is the site of the earliest known human burial.
40:10The remains of several adults and children were found, including a boy buried with a deer antler
40:16placed across his chest.
40:31The Kavzah Cave at the bottom of a cenote in eastern Mexico, archaeologists found the remains
40:36of a young woman who died more than 13,000 years ago.
40:41Her DNA is a close match to many indigenous people living in Central and North America today.
40:49For tens of thousands of years, people in every part of the world
40:53have been carrying out rituals and ceremonies as part of their burial practices.
40:59While there were tens of millions living in the Americas in 1491,
41:03the population soon after people arrived would only have been in the thousands.
41:08It's not surprising that the discovery of an ancestor from this period is an extremely rare event.
41:1513,000 years ago, a teenage girl in the Yucatan fell into a deep hole and died.
41:20Over the millennia, sea levels rose and water filled the cave.
41:25In the 1990s, a group of underwater archaeologists found Naya, as they named her,
41:31in 40 meters of water deep in a cenote near Tulum.
41:35Testing Naya's DNA confirmed that she is a direct ancestor of the indigenous people living in North and
41:42Central America today.
41:43When the human genome was sequenced early in the 21st century, it opened the door for geneticists
41:49to study the biological blueprint of human beings. The data collected from studying the DNA found in
41:55human cells can be used to trace a person's ancestry. By comparing the DNA of modern indigenous
42:02people with that of ancient people, we can see how our ancestors migrated and settled down during the
42:08past several thousand years. It's using your DNA to look at similarities between different populations.
42:16So there are many different ways we can do it. We can look at your maternal lineage, we can look
42:22at
42:22your paternal lineage, or we can look at everything, which is the whole genome. And in that instance,
42:29we're sort of looking at the entirety of your father's contribution, your mother's, and all of your
42:36ancestors. This is just another way to think about our past and figure out how we were related to each
42:43other. We are all really connected, and our genetics is telling us that, too. To have a really rigorous
42:50study, you want to have ancient samples, because with the ancient samples, you can tell, date it back
42:56really accurately, how long ago did they live, and what did they eat, and also where were they.
43:05If we're looking at ancient DNA, we're only looking at the people that they actually were able to
43:10extract DNA from. These are only 50 people, but there were thousands of people at that time, and
43:16there are very few samples that have been included from the United States and also from Canada. The
43:22majority of them have been from South America and Central America. What does DNA from the ancient
43:29ancestors we've discovered tell us about our origins? Actually, the closest relations to natives in
43:39the Americas is from sort of Central Asia. So we know that we migrated in, but a lot of people
43:47have
43:47questions about, was it just one big migration? Did it happen at multiple times? Did we actually migrate
43:55and stay in one spot, or did we just spread all over the Americas? And how many migrations occurred?
44:03DNA can only tell us so much. We need to know, actually, when these occurred, where they occurred.
44:09So if a group split off from another group, just by looking at DNA, we can sort of make a
44:15guess, but we
44:16won't actually know where it occurred or when it occurred unless we have archaeological data.
44:23The study of DNA from ancient peoples requires a culturally sensitive approach and ongoing
44:29consultation with indigenous communities. While archaeology and genetics may seem at odds with our
44:35indigenous origin stories, they all contribute to the overall history of our peoples.
44:44DNA. Going back to my creation story that I grew up with, it was a journey because I think a
44:50lot of
44:51creation stories are journeys, and that's how I sort of reconcile it with the genetics. We're talking
44:57about population migration. Our ancestors, they went on this huge, long journey for thousands of years,
45:07and I'm a product of that. So not only did they have to journey across continents and oceans, but we,
45:16they
45:16also had to fight disease. And once European contact came, so many of our people died, our ancestors. But we
45:25here as living people are actually the products of all of that, that long journey.
45:37When Christopher Columbus first encountered indigenous people in our traditional territory more than 500
45:44years ago, he mistakenly called us Los Indios. He thought he'd found a new route to India, but he'd actually
45:55arrived in a world unlike anywhere else on earth. A world that was home to thousands of distinct nations
46:02and millions of people. Today, we keep our history alive through our stories and traditional knowledge.
46:12And we stay connected to our ancestors through the material culture they left behind before 1491.
46:49And we stay connected to our ancestors through our ancestors.
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