The Red Man's Continent: A Chronicle of Aboriginal America — John Shaqi
The Red Man's Continent: A Chronicle of Aboriginal AmericaHuntington, Ellsworth
History
The Red Man's Continent: A Chronicle of Aboriginal America
Huntington, Ellsworth
Human geography -- North America; Indians of North America; Physical geography -- North America
During the glacial epochs the interior of Asia was well watered and full
of game which supplied the primitive human hunters. With the advent
of each interglacial epoch the rains diminished, grass and trees
disappeared, and the desert spread over enormous tracts. Both men
and animals must have been driven to sore straits for lack of food.
Migration to better regions was the only recourse. Thus for hundreds
of thousands of years there appears to have been a constantly recurring
outward push from the center of the world's greatest land mass. That
push, with the consequent overcrowding of other regions, seems to have
been one of the chief forces impelling people to migrate and cover the
earth.
Among the primitive men who were pushed outward from the Asian deserts
during a period of aridity, one group migrated northeastward toward
the Kamchatkan corner of Asia. Whether they reached Bering Sea and the
Kamchatkan shore before the next epoch of glaciation we do not know.
Doubtless they moved slowly, perhaps averaging only a few score or
a hundred miles per generation, for that is generally the way with
migrations of primitive people advancing into unoccupied territory. Yet
sometimes they may have moved with comparative rapidity. I have seen a
tribe of herdsmen in central Asia abandon its ancestral home and start
on a zigzag march of a thousand miles because of a great drought. The
grass was so scanty that there was not enough to support the animals.
The tribe left a trail of blood, for wherever it moved it infringed upon
the rights of others and so with conflict was driven onward. In some
such way the primitive wanderers were kept in movement until at
last they reached the bleak shores of the North Pacific. Even there
something--perhaps sheer curiosity--still urged them on. The green
island across the bay may have been so enticing that at last a raft of
logs was knotted together with stout withes. Perhaps at first the men
paddled themselves across alone, but the hunting and fishing proved so
good that at length they took the women and children with them, and so
advanced another step along the route toward America. At other times
distress, strife, or the search for game may have led the primitive
nomads on and on along the coast until a day came when the Asian home
was left and the New World was entered. The route by which primitive
man entered America is important because it determined the surroundings
among which the first Americans lived for many generations. It has
sometimes been thought that the red men came to America by way of the
Kurile Islands, Kamchatka, and the Aleutian Islands. If this was their
route, they avoided a migration of two or three thousand miles through
one of the coldest and most inhospitable of regions. This, however,
is far from probable. The distance from Kamchatka to the first of the
Aleutian Islands is over one hundred miles. As the island is not in
sight from the mainland, there is little chance that a band of savages,
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