Who was the first Native American Indian?

Answer 1

That's an interesting question and not an easy concept to understand, for several reasons:

• You are thinking of a prehistoric time long before any of the tribal groups we know today came into existence. The people were Pleistocene Siberian hunter-gatherers who had no concept of Asia or North America.
• The continents of Asia and North America were one large land mass, joined together at the Bering land bridge, so there was no feeling of people travelling to a new land, they were simply extending their existing hunting areas and following game animals.
• The migrations across the Bering land bridge happened many times by people speaking many different languages, in successive waves of migration. This explains the huge number of later language groups found throughout the Americas.
• Some historians suggest that the earliest wave of migrants were those who journeyed the furthest south into South America - the distant ancestors of the Tierra del Fuegans - but this may not be the case.
• For a very long time, historians thought that the earliest evidence for Man in the Americas was the Clovis culture of 11,500 years ago. From the late 1990s, however, Archaeology has uncovered sites in Chile and Brazil that may be 12,500 years old. A rock shelter in Pennsylvania has provided dates up to 16,000 years old; some people claim to have found evidence dating to even before this time. Archaeological finds and studies continue, so science will eventually provide an answer to the oldest evidence of Man in the Americas, but as yet there is none.

I recommend that you buy and read a copy of the book "In the Hands of the Great Spirit" by Jake Page, which examines all the scientific evidence for the Siberian migrations into the Americas, as well as some of the native stories about tribal origins.

Answer 2

Billy bob