wild game they could walk across the 56 miles from Siberia to
Alaska. Without knowing it, they had discovered two large
continents that were completely empty of people but were full
of wild game.... In the thousands of years afterwards many
other groups followed. These small bands spread all across
North and South America.Actually, while most scholars still accept a “Beringia” crossing,
archaeological evidence is slim, and more and more archaeologists believe
boat crossings, accidental or purposeful, may have been the method. After all,
people got to Australia at least forty thousand years ago, and no matter how
much ice piled up on land during the Ice Age, you could never walk to
Australia, across the deep ocean divide known as Wallace’s Line. Of course,
archaeologists have unearthed no evidence of boats anywhere in the world
dating back more than ten thousand years. But then, no artifacts survive from so
long ago other than stone tools, and no humans were ever so primitive as to
fashion stone boats. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.^15
Textbook writers like Beringia, I believe, because it fits their overall story
line of unrelenting progress. The people themselves are pictured as primitive
savages, vaguely Neanderthalian. This archetype—not very bright, enmeshed
in wars with nature and other humans—probably underlies authors’ certainty
that they must have walked. Unlike us, the original Americans didn’t have to be
intelligent—they just had to walk.^16 And they certainly weren’t bright, for
“without knowing it, they had discovered two large continents.” This is a
startling assertion. Somehow our authors, writing at least eleven thousand
years after the fact, know what these first settlers thought—or, rather, know that
they did not think they had reached new continents. John Garraty’s American
History makes the same claim: “They did not know that they were exploring a
new continent.” Now, continent means “a large land mass, surrounded by
water.” How could humans confront the vastness of Canada—itself larger than
Australia—and not know they were exploring a large land mass? These first
settlers must have been stunningly stupid.^17
The depiction of mental dullness persists as Garraty tells of “the wanderers”
who “moved slowly southward and to the east.... Many thousand years
passed before they had spread over all of North and South America.” Actually,
many archaeologists believe that people reached most parts of the Americas
within a thousand years, far too rapidly to allow easy archaeological