Native American Origins: Asian Ancestry Discovered?
Updated: 3 days ago
Did Native Americans Come From Asia? Shanique Byrd Explores the Origins of America’s Indigenous Peoples
Shanique Byrd, founder of Tocsin Magazine, raises a fascinating question about one of the oldest chapters in American history: Where did the first Indigenous peoples of the Americas actually come from?
In a video featured with this article, Byrd discusses the origins of Native Americans with another speaker. While her conversation partner suggests that Indigenous peoples developed directly on the American continent, Byrd points to research suggesting that their distant ancestors may have originated in Asia before migrating into the Americas.
Who is Shanique Byrd?
Byrd is the founder and publisher of Tocsin Magazine, a publication that began in 2011 and has covered entertainment, culture, social issues, and social justice. Over the years, Tocsin has published material ranging from urban entertainment and celebrity culture to issues involving incarceration and racial justice. One of its documented special editions, The Fight For Justice, focused on incarceration, the Innocence Project and related issues.
For Byrd, however, journalism is also about asking questions that challenge familiar versions of history. That makes her discussion about the origins of Native Americans particularly interesting
So, what does science actually tell us?
Modern genetic research strongly supports an ancient connection between the ancestors of Indigenous Americans and populations of northeastern Asia. During the last Ice Age, sea levels were much lower, exposing a vast region known as Beringia between present-day Siberia and Alaska.
Researchers believe ancestral populations lived in or around Beringia for thousands of years before expanding into the Americas. As the climate changed and glaciers retreated, populations moved southward and eastward, eventually spreading throughout North and South America.
The story, however, was not a single migration followed by a simple expansion. Ancient DNA research shows that different population movements contributed to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Some groups separated, mixed, migrated again, and developed in relative isolation for thousands of years.
By roughly 15,000 years ago, humans were clearly established in parts of the Americas, although evidence continues to push the possible date of earlier human presence further back. Over thousands of years, these populations adapted to dramatically different environments, from the Arctic to the Great Plains, deserts, forests and tropical regions.
This long process produced hundreds of distinct Indigenous nations, languages and cultures.
For New Yorkers, this history is more than an archaeological story from the distant past. The New York region itself has a deep Indigenous history, including the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and Lenape homeland.
The video featuring Shanique Byrd offers an opportunity to revisit that history, and to ask how much more there is still to discover about the first peoples of America.
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