american-holocaust

ON PRE-COLUMBIAN SETTLEMENT AND POPULATION 265Asia earlier than 40,000 or so B.C., the entire history of the field of archaeologyis testament to the truism that absence of evidence for the existenceof a phenomenon is not sufficient grounds for categorically declaringit to be or to have been non-existent; site degradation and loss is a veryserious problem in regions such as this-and there is always a new discoveryto be made. This is an especially relevant consideration when the temporalgap between archaeological evidence for modern humans in northeasternAsia and in other parts of the world has now yawned open to arange of between 60,000 and 90,000-and possibly as much as 150,000-years.In sum, there is no necessary barrier to the possibility that humanswhetherof modern or pre-modern type-entered the Western Hemisphereas early as 60,000 or 70,000 years ago, although the best scientific evidenceto date, drawing on coalescent findings from several disciplines, suggestsa more prudent estimate would be for an entry date of around 40,000B.C., or perhaps a little earlier.In mapping the pre-Columbian native languages of North America, anextraordinarily dense collection of different tongues are found along thewestern seaboard, especially between present-day southern British Columbiaand San Francisco. (California alone was home to at least 500 distinctcultural communities prior to European contact.) Unless the post-Columbiandisease holocaust in the Eastern part of the continent was immensely greaterthan most scholars now believe, resulting in the extinction of many scoresof entire language groups before they could be separated out and distinguishedby early European explorers and settlers, the especially thick concentrationof different languages along the west coast suggests that to havebeen the path of earliest human dispersal and settlement.Whether the earliest southward-moving exodus from Berengia, over thecourse of many thousands of years, was carried out primarily on land oron sea--or whether the path of the earliest population movements downthrough North America toward Mexico was along the west coast or througha temporary ice-free corridor in what is now America's northern midwest-arestill other controversies that remain unsettled. Traditionally, ithas been held that the earliest migrants south from Alaska had to wait fortemporary melts to open inland passageways through the glaciers thatblocked their way. Such ice-free interstadials occurred at least five timesduring the Wisconsin era, each one lasting for thousands of years, withthe mid-point of the most temporally distant one located about 75,000years ago. It now appears increasingly likely, however, that early Alaskainhabitants might not have had to follow an inland path, but rather mayhave made their way south along the Pacific coastline, either overland,along a narrow, unglaciated, but exposed part of the continental shelf, orby sea, in coast-hugging wooden dugouts or skin boats. 14Since it is known that the first human inhabitants of New Guinea andAustralia (which, during the Wisconsin glaciation, was a single land mass)