NOMADS
In this particular vignette we are contemplating
the possibility that some meeting between Asian nomads coming West to East
meeting European nomads coming East to West gives rise to the myth of the White
Gods coming from the East that made the Native Americans so hospitable to the
Europeans who arrive on their shores some 17,500 years later.
18,000 years ago there is an ice age. The
polar caps reach well into temperate latitudes. Around the southern rim of
the North Pole, nomads find their way from Siberia and Europe along the edge of
the ice and down into North America.
People from Siberia find their way across the
Baring Strait and the people of South Western Europe cross the Atlantic.
With a strong current and favorable weather, the trip might have taken as little
as three weeks. Simultaneously flotillas of immigrants are entering South
America from the Pacific. Mitochondrial DNA studies confirm South China or
Indonesia ancestry of much of the present aboriginal population in South
America. The typical surprised reaction of anthropologists to Pleistocene
Brazilian skulls is that they resemble no current race. Skeletons of
mastodon-hunters in Peru look neanderthaloid, totally unlike native Peruvians
today.
The nomads crossing the Atlantic from the East
are hunter gatherers. They know how to stampede horse and cattle herds over
cliffs like later Paleo-Indians stampede bison and elephants, occasionally
camels and horses. They travel in very small bands, living in the open and
staying in one place only a few days at a time.
They have the technology such as the eyed bone
needle to build seaworthy craft similar to those used by Eskimos and Inuit to
the present day. They paint pictures of canoes, kayaks, and dugout types in red
or black in Pleistocene Spanish caves at La Pasiege, Castillo, and La Pileta,
which include the midship gunwale peak later seen in Beothuk watercraft of
Newfoundland. They are experts at catching and killing the fish and marine
mammals that hunt and feed among the icebergs with multi-barbed bone harpoons.
They are in the habit of burying caches of stone
artifacts and covering them in red ochre. They make flint blades and arrow and
spear heads using the edge-to-edge or "outre passe" bifacial
percussion flaking . Their speciality is exquisite laurel- and willow-leaf
projectile points, sometimes fluted-as hafted and hurled by hand or atlatl.
Fluting is a groove partway up the blade, both thining the haft and
allowing a better join. Fluted all the way up, Folsom points find
perfection in Clovis culture after mammoths (and mastodons) had disappeared,
leaving bison primary prey. Then Archaic Plano points, which dispensed
with fluting, target smaller species such as we have known since.
Over the next six millennia, their hunting and
gathering culture spread as far as the American deserts and Canadian tundra, and
perhaps into South America.
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