Early Migrations to the Americas

Other researchers examine the connections among the languages of the New World to try to uncover relationships among the first peoples of this place. Linguists now believe that the languages spoken by American Indians could never have belonged to a single family, meaning that there were several different migrations to the New World fairly widely separated in time (West, 1996, p. 529).

However scanty the archaeological record may be and however complex the linguistic record, it is fairly certain that the people who first came to the Americas belonged to food collector societies not that different from the extant technologically simple and socially egalitarian food collector societies of modern times.

As soon as humans had made their successful crossing crossed the land bridge to the Americas and began to settle here, they began a process of adaptations to their new world that would differentiate them

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les had already undergone, they faced far more dramatic and rapid shifts after Europeans came in large number to the New World. Oswalt (1973) notes that at first contact Indians and Europeans were easily distinguished from each other by their language, style of dress, foods and physical/racial characteristics (Oswalt, 1973, p. 5). But these differences began to blur at the very moment of contact as cultural and linguistic traits began to be traded and children resulted from mixed-race pairings until the borders between American Indians and other peoples became increasingly difficult to locate. Another way of putting this is to say that the most successful traits of Indians have become incorporated (either genetically or culturally) into other individuals and populations. The question of how have American Indians have succeeded must (as suggested above) be evaluated in at least two different ways. American Indians (including the first peoples of California) have certainly not survived in their original condition. But through assimilation they have done better than one might otherwise believe. Oswalt describes the complex nature of the contemporary American Indian. Some "persons may be Indian in one context and white in anot
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Approximate Word count = 1621
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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