Americas Hero Again His Victory the Comeback That America Needed Quizlet
Americans get a day off work on October 10 to celebrate Columbus Solar day. It's an annual vacation that commemorates the day on Oct 12, 1492, when the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus officially set pes in the Americas, and claimed the land for Spain. It has been a national vacation in the United States since 1937.
It is commonly said that "Columbus discovered America." Information technology would exist more accurate, possibly, to say that he introduced the Americas to Western Europe during his four voyages to the region between 1492 and 1502. It'south also rubber to say that he paved the fashion for the massive influx of western Europeans that would ultimately grade several new nations including the United States, Canada and Mexico.
But to say he "discovered" America is a flake of a misnomer because at that place were plenty of people already here when he arrived.
And before Columbus?
So who were the people who actually deserve to be chosen the first Americans? VOA asked Michael Bawaya, the editor of the magazine American Archaeology. He told VOA that they came here from Asia probably "no subsequently than most 15,000 years ago."
They walked beyond the Bering land bridge that back in the mean solar day connected what is now the U.Southward. state of Alaska and Siberia. Fifteen-thousand years ago, bounding main levels were much lower and the land betwixt the continents was hundreds of kilometers wide.
The expanse would have looked much like the state on Alaska's Seward Peninsula does today: treeless, arid tundra. But despite its relative inhospitality, life abounded there.
According to the U.S. National Park Service, "the state bridge played a vital function in the spread of plant and animate being life between the continents. Many species of animals - the woolly mammoth, mastodon, scimitar cat, Arctic camel, brownish deport, moose, muskox, and horse — to name a few — moved from ane continent to the other across the Bering land bridge. Birds, fish, and marine mammals established migration patterns that continue to this day."
And archaeologists say that humans followed, in a never-ending chase for food, water and shelter. Once here, humans dispersed all across N and eventually Cardinal and South America.
Up until the 1970s, these get-go Americans had a name: the Clovis peoples. They get their proper name from an ancient settlement discovered near Clovis, New United mexican states, dated to over 11,000 years ago. And DNA suggests they are the direct ancestors of most 80 percent of all ethnic people in the Americas.
Merely there's more. Today, information technology's widely believed that earlier the Clovis people, in that location were others, and as Bawaya says, "they oasis't really been identified." But in that location are remants of them in places as far-flung as the U.Southward. states of Texas and Virginia, and as far s as Peru and Republic of chile. Nosotros telephone call them, for lack of a better name, the Pre-Clovis people.
And to make things more complicated, recent discoveries are threatening to push dorsum the arrival of humans in North America even further back in fourth dimension. Maybe every bit far back equally 20,000 years or more. Merely the science on this is far from settled.
Back to the Europeans
And then for at present, the Clovis and the Pre-Clovis peoples, long disappeared but still real in the genetic code of almost all native Americans, deserve the credit for discovering America.
But those people arrived on the western coast. What about arrivals from the due east? Was Columbus the showtime European to glimpse the untamed, verdant paradise that America must have been centuries ago?
Not fifty-fifty shut.
There is proof that Europeans visited what is now Canada about 500 years before Columbus set sheet. They were Vikings, and prove of their presence can exist establish on the Canadian island of Newfoundland at a place chosen 50'Anse Aux Meadows. Information technology is now a UNESCO Globe Heritage site and consists of the remains of eight buildings that were likely wooden structures covered with grass and soil.
Today the area is barren, but a thousand years ago there were copse everywhere and the area probable was used as winter stopover point, where Vikings repaired their boats and saturday out bad weather condition. It's not quite clear if the surface area was a permanent settlement, just it is articulate that the expansion-minded Norsemen were here long earlier Columbus.
One concluding mystery
And to add i fascinating wrinkle to the story of America'due south notice, consider the Sweetness Potato.
Yes, that'southward right the sweetness potato. This apprehensive pink-red tuber is native to South America. And yet, at that place have been sweetness potatoes on the card in Polynesia as far back as 1,000 years agone. So how did it get there?
Past comparing the Dna of Polynesian and Due south American sweet potatoes, scientists remember it's clear that someone either brought them back to Polynesia afterwards visiting Southward America, or islanders brought them from South America when they were exploring the Pacific Sea. Either manner, information technology suggests that nigh the same fourth dimension Nordic sailors were cutting trees in Canada, someone in Polynesia was trying sweet potatoes from S America for the first fourth dimension.
Speaking of genetics, a 2014 study of the DNA of natives on the Polynesian island of Rapa Nui, also known equally Easter Isle, plant a fair amount of Native American genes in the mix. The entry of American DNA into the genetics of the Rapa Nui natives suggests that the two peoples were living together effectually 1280 AD.
There are other theories out at that place. A retired British Naval officer named Gavin Menzies has been pushing the idea that the Chinese colonized South America in 1421.
Another theory from a retired chemist named John Ruskamp suggests that pictographs discovered in Arizona are nearly identical to Chinese characters. He puts the Chinese in the U.S. state of Arizona sometime around 1300 BC.
We mention these two but because we accept seen them pop up in newspaper manufactures recently. They're thoroughly discredited, and so we'll exit it at that.
A melting pot indeed
Then what to make of all this?
Well, here at VOA, we are trying to tell the story of America. And what is clear is that America was a melting pot hundreds of years before the Statue of Freedom began urging the earth, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
In fact, the entirety of N and South America are a polyglot of cultures stretching dorsum before recorded history. And people have been coming here ever since, chasing a improve life, abundant nutrient, water and opportunity.
Today, maybe not that much has changed.
Source: https://www.voanews.com/a/who-discovered-america/3541542.html
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