The Last Word On Nothing

I don’t know how I managed to not know this for my whole life, but here it is: the Americas were the last continents to have people on them. By around 30,000 years ago, all the other continents had people on them. We didn’t have any people. Nobody. Empty of people.

Why not? How do continents gets their people anyway? Well, in the beginning people evolved. They evolved in Africa, and later maybe some kind of evolution refinements were going on in Europe and Asia and Australia. But not here, not in the New World. I asked a couple of anthropologists, “Why not?” And they said “Nope, before 20,000 years ago, no evidence of people whatever. They just didn’t evolve here.”

“Well why not?” I said. “Wrong monkeys,” they said, and I’m paraphrasing. The great apes with the capacity for evolving into humans didn’t live here. We had only miscellaneous little monkeys — the New World monkeys which, granted, evolved from Old World monkeys but neither one evolved into humans. No, I don’t know why not.

So if people didn’t evolve here, they must have come in from the outside, from the other continents, immigrated in like immigrants, right? Right you are. Once homo sapiens — wise humans, somebody’s sense of humor I guess — evolved in Africa, they headed out on all directions. By 40,000 years ago, they’d moved over into Asia, down into Southeast Asia, up into Siberia, even to Australia, and up to Europe. They didn’t get to the Americas until about 20,000 years ago. The Siberians must have gotten curious about the stretch of land crossing the ocean to the east and trekked across it.

These people, the Asians, came in waves: an early, maybe the first, wave went straight south along the west coast, and by 14,500 years ago was at the tip of South America. Other waves, maybe around the same time, maybe later, came inland into North America, down an ice-free corridor between glaciers, then skirted the bottom of the glaciers and headed south and east — though the archeological evidence is indirect at best and inevitably hit-or-miss.

The Asians also circulated in South America and everywhere began the business of civilizing themselves. They first settled somewhere, built houses, learned to grow their own food, found the commonalities — the languages and religions and meeting places — that let them form tribes, communities, villages, cities, states, and in a few cases — Aztec, Maya, Inka — create civilizations as impressive as those in the Old World. In general, it’s kind of a pretty story, people doing great things by making communities.

The story gets less pretty once the Old World — you know this already — became aware of the new one. The first people to come over were the Vikings and one Italian; then Spanish, Portuguese, English, Scots/Irish, French, Russians, and later, Germans, Scandanavians, Irish, Italians. Each one settled in its own communities and declared that the previous immigrants were not really humans or later, that the next immigrants were not really humans. And of course the special case is the Africans who immigrated, not because they wanted to but because Europeans had already decided they weren’t really humans — which is rich considering that the Africans were the first humans. We’re still doing it, running around declaring immigrants not humans.

I’m beginning to piss myself off, talking about this. And you certainly see what I’m getting at: nobody, NOBODY, was in this New World. Plenty of animals and plants, no humans. Every single one of us, we all came here. Every variegated one of us is an immigrant. I’m not saying waves of immigrants don’t cause problems or that dehumanizing them isn’t as human as sliced bread. I’m saying the problems and dehumanization have solutions that aren’t rocket science. I’m also saying that, looking at the arguments over those solutions and getting pissed off again, I sometimes wish the Siberians had looked at the Bering land bridge and said, “Nah. Leave it empty.”

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Pictures: New and Unknown World by Arnold Montanus, 1671; Village of the Secotan Indians in North Carolina, by John White,1585. Both from the splendidly intriguing Public Domain Review