I just read the novel People of the Wolf by W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear, about the first Paleoindians to enter North America. There is a tribe who finds the way through the glacier into the new world. Just as the glaciers are starting to melt and the ocean is starting to rise.
But the authors did not make it clear exactly where this passageway was: Did the tribe migrate from Siberia/Beringia into Alaska? Or from western Alaska into central Alaska? They keep talking about going “south” even though to get from Siberia to Alaska you would have to go due east. The land they migrate from is described as having a “great river,” as well as mountains, plains, and hot springs, but none of its features are identifiable.
They talk of warlike nations of white people further north and west who suffer from some disease, who are putting pressure on their neighbors which forces them to migrate. None of this is identifiable with any prehistorical facts I know of, even though the authors are professional archeologists.
They talk of the Big Salt Water threatening to inundate the lands to the west and north. If the land being flooded is Beringia, then that would mean they’re already in western Alaska? I wish there were more clues in the writing that would allow the reader to place the events somewhere definite, because the story is about an important real event, the beginning of the peopling of America.
Dude…it’s a novel. It doesn’t have to be completely factual.
The debate about how America was first populated rages on. Most boil down to two options - an ice-free corridor extending along mountain ranges through to the eastern Rockies, or just drifting down the coast to the more temperate regions. So far, little evidence either way. The latter never will have much of any - any coastal sites have since been washed away as sea level rose.
Beringia is en route, though. Subtle similarities between Americans and Northern Asians have been totaled up. The one that sticks out in my mind is the shovel-shaped incisor. Americans and Northern Asians have a dent in the back of their front teeth that doesn’t show up in other groups going back through time. I believe Athabaskan languages exist on both sides of the straight. I’d have to scrounge to get more info, but say the word if you want it.
Well, I don’t know about the geography, but I have read that the original human inhabitants of the Americas supposedly had more in common with modern Caucasians than the current ‘natives’, who came across 12-16,000 years ago and exterminated them. I don’t think they were warlike, or if they were they weren’t very effective, they were still quite primitive compared to the newcomers.
The novel was written in 1990, so it reflects archeological thinking of that time (the shovel-shaped teeth are mentioned at one point). The coastal migration and “Caucasian” features are developments of the last decade, so they do not figure in this book. The characters are described as having flat, round faces.
Sure, novelists can write anything they please, they can have the first Americans beaming down from the Reticulan star system, no problem. But the premise of this book is that it was written by professional anthropologists, so one would expect their narrative to have some coherence with facts on the ground.
They depict the migrating tribe as non-warlike, but having to move under pressure from a warlike tribe related to them, who in turn were under pressure from even more warlike diseased white people further inside Asia.
They were led by the visions of a shaman who was shown the way through the glacier into the new world by his spirit wolf totem. The shaman pursues his spirit visions by tripping on magic mushrooms and the climactic scene is quite impressively psychedelic.