The Native Americans.

Scuola Media Illuminato-Cirino
Classe 2H

THE NATIVE AMERICANS

WORKGROUP 1
Francesco De Rosa, Antonella Fioretto, Luigi Puglia, Michele Feniello, Domenico Boenzi.

THE HISTORY OF THE NATIVE AMERICANS

The history of Native Americans in the United States began in the Pre-Columbian era with the settlement of the Americas by the Paleo-Indians. A wide variety of cultures in the era prior to European contact have been identified and studied. European contact had a profound impact on the history. According to the most generally accepted theory of the settlement of the Americas, migrations of humans from Eurasia to the Americas took place via Beringia, a land bridge which connected the two continents across what is now the Bering Strait. The number and composition of the migrations is still being debated.Falling sea levels associated with an intensive period of Quaternary glaciation created the Bering land bridge that joined Siberia to Alaska about 60,000–25,000 years ago. The latest this migration could have taken place is 12,000 years ago; the earliest remains undetermined.

Three major migrations occurred, as traced by linguistic and genetic data; the early Paleoamericans soon spread throughout the Americas, diversifying into many hundreds of culturally distinct nations and tribes. By 8000 BCE the North American climate was very similar to today's. A study published in 2012 gives genetic backing to the 1986 theory put forward by linguist Joseph Greenberg that the Americas must have been populated in three waves, based on language differences. The arrival of Europeans affected both the Native Americans and Europeans in both positive and negative ways. For the Native Americans, the European's arrival brought diseases that they had not yet encountered nor had the medicine to cure.