Like I looked up boats and according to Wikipedia, the earliest boats found are a million years ago. Pangea broke apart 200 million years ago. So how come Native Americans existed before the colonizers found the land?
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There was a land bridge between Asia and America up where Russia and Alaska are now. Sea levels were significantly lower during a period about 26,000 years ago and the area was exposed until about 11,000 years ago. During that time hunter gatherer groups from Siberia migrated into North America and their descendants populated the Americas.
There used to be a section of [dry land connecting Alaska and Kamchatka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia) during the last ice age. You could just walk from Europe/Asia to North America on foot. A few thousand people did, then the ice age ended and the melting mega-glaciers raised sea level by a *lot* and now that area is 25-50m underwater. The people who moved over settled and gradually spread across the continent.
Genetic testing of the indigenous South Americans also suggests that Polynesians made it to Peru & Chile sometime time around the years 1100-1400 CE or so as well.
During the latest iceage, sealevels were lower and a landbridge formed between asia and alaska. Thats how the early migration happend, around 30 000 years ago.
Wait wait wait, sorry, I just got hung up on the earliest boats being a million years old. That’s certainly an error somewhere, human beings as a species are only roughly 250,000 years old and most ancient man-made relics are ~~ 45,000 years.
Where the heck did you see something about a million year old boat?
EDIT – I stand corrected and need to reexamine my unconscious biases – turns out our distant ancestor Homo Erectus was possibly using boats to cruise the gaps between islands in Indonesia 750,000-900,000 years ago.
There are 2 answers. There is some proof that the sea level was actually much lower only 20-30k years ago leaving many land bridges that no longer exist. For America specifically the ice age allowed people to migrate towards the American continents. Specifically from Russia to the Alaskan peninsula is relatively a short trip. But also allowed the people in Asia to travel to the many pacific islands on shorter boat trips compared to now.
Supposedly there is also proof of much earlier humans traveling to the Americas in an earlier ice age.
That’s why us natives look so Asian, I’m talking about natives in northern Arizona. The southern part look Mexican or southern American. But that’s just my observation.
This is usually learned in 4th or 5th grade here in the US. But the common thought is that there was a passable land bridge between Russia and Alaska. Nomadic people followed the food across at some point and then headed south.
Besides all the answers here that point out (correctly) that there was a land bridge between what are now Russia and Alaska, there is some evidence of other small, isolated visits of other people.
– Some Viking visits in the 10th Century
– Clovis and the Pre-Clovis peoples, long before that. (There is an ongoing debate about where these people came from. It’s worth looking up on Wikipedia.
I don’t really understand what you’re saying about boats. Yes boats existed about a million years ago. Yes humans could get to America via boat.
The Polynesian civilisation was sailing the Pacific a couple thousand years ago.
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