The first people to come to the New World probably came to the Americas across the Bering Land Bridge or the land mass that is sometimes called Beringia. The archaeological record is still somewhat confusing on this point, and researchers continue to sift through the physical clues to the earliest human presence in this hemisphere, trying to determine (for example) whether there was a sufficient density of prey animals in the Bering area to have afforded enough food for humans to sustain themselves during the long journey between continents (Dixon, 1993, p. 28).
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 themselves from other groups of New World settlers. Some of these adaptations would prove successful and some less so, although the definition of human success is sufficiently complex to preclude any simple assessment of various adaptations. This paper briefly reviews the general concept of both cultural and biological adaptations. It then makes some educated hypothesis about the adaptations made by the inhabitants who first came to our own area, discussing...