Documentary, The True Ancient Origins Of The Native Americans 1491 Before Columbus
In 1491, the Americas were densely populated by millions of people, featuring massive, sophisticated cities like Tenochtitlán, advanced environmental engineering (including Amazonian "orchards"), and complex agriculture, challenging the perception of a sparsely inhabited wilderness before Columbus's arrival. Indigenous ancestors likely migrated from Asia via the Bering Land Bridge, with newer evidence suggesting earlier arrivals than previously believed.
Population and Development: By 1491, the Americas likely had a population larger than Europe. Indigenous peoples in the Americas, such as the Aztec, Maya, and Inca, had created large urban centers, and in some cases, were manipulating their environments on a massive scale.
The 1491 World: Far from an untouched wilderness, the Americas were a heavily "landscaped" environment. Indigenous peoples practiced sophisticated agriculture and land management, such as the creation of rich black earth in the Amazon, and controlled forest fires, demonstrating an advanced interaction with their surroundings.
Origins Debate: Traditional theories, often referred to as the "Clovis First" model, suggested humans arrived via a Bering land bridge about 13,000 to 13,500 years ago. However, modern research and findings show human presence much earlier, potentially upwards of 20,000 years ago.
Culture and Technology: Pre-Columbian societies had deep knowledge of medicine (e.g., using bark for pain), agriculture, and urban design.
Impact of 1491 Revaluation: The book 1491 by Charles C. Mann (a cornerstone of this perspective) argues that the Americas were a vibrant, densely populated, and highly managed continent.
#NativeAmericans #Americans #Documentary #Columbus
In 1491, the Americas were densely populated by millions of people, featuring massive, sophisticated cities like Tenochtitlán, advanced environmental engineering (including Amazonian "orchards"), and complex agriculture, challenging the perception of a sparsely inhabited wilderness before Columbus's arrival. Indigenous ancestors likely migrated from Asia via the Bering Land Bridge, with newer evidence suggesting earlier arrivals than previously believed.
Population and Development: By 1491, the Americas likely had a population larger than Europe. Indigenous peoples in the Americas, such as the Aztec, Maya, and Inca, had created large urban centers, and in some cases, were manipulating their environments on a massive scale.
The 1491 World: Far from an untouched wilderness, the Americas were a heavily "landscaped" environment. Indigenous peoples practiced sophisticated agriculture and land management, such as the creation of rich black earth in the Amazon, and controlled forest fires, demonstrating an advanced interaction with their surroundings.
Origins Debate: Traditional theories, often referred to as the "Clovis First" model, suggested humans arrived via a Bering land bridge about 13,000 to 13,500 years ago. However, modern research and findings show human presence much earlier, potentially upwards of 20,000 years ago.
Culture and Technology: Pre-Columbian societies had deep knowledge of medicine (e.g., using bark for pain), agriculture, and urban design.
Impact of 1491 Revaluation: The book 1491 by Charles C. Mann (a cornerstone of this perspective) argues that the Americas were a vibrant, densely populated, and highly managed continent.
#NativeAmericans #Americans #Documentary #Columbus
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LearningTranscript
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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