AMERICAN INDIANS

Without wishing to insult you, i would point out that you are asking a question which cannot be answered, and which is, at base, meaningless. Tribes and cultures have come and gone among the first humans to arrive in the North American and South American continents. Which tribes among those currently known to exist descend from those earlier tribes and cultures could not be stated with any real authority. Although i do not doubt that one or more persons may show up here purporting to have an answer, i suspect that any argument purporting to have an answer to suggest that given tribes were the oldest would degenerate into a pissing contest if people were willing to argue it.

I thik it was the Woo Woo Welchs tribe, who were well known for putting up prserves and jelly in decorative glassware. Some of this decorative glassware can still be found even today.

Re: AMERICAN INDIANS


I don't know the answer, but I want to address your question. There were people living in the lands that are now called the United States long before Europeans landed on the shores of what is now referred to as North America.

I am always amazed that students are taught that explorers "discovered" America. America was not "discovered" by the Europeans. The land had existed, and people had been living there, for many centuries, before a European ship landed.

Oh, BTW please don't post in caps. It is considered "screaming", and is poor netiquette. Thanks!

Re: AMERICAN INDIANS


Due to some idiocy known as Political Correctness; they are now referred to as Native Americans. Not sure who was here first though...

You might want to do an in depth research project, which would include contacting the various tribes on an individual basis and seeing what they have to say about their history. That in part may give you a firmer foundation for knowing which group is the oldest.

You may never be able to find out which tribe is the oldest simply because there almost no (if any) written records available from the Indian cultures in North/South America. However, you could try a different approach to your quandary.

Look at it from the research done by anthropologists. Their findings suggest a migration across the land bridge that existed many thousands of years ago between what is now Russia and Alaska. This may be the only way to restructure a chronological hierarchy of the Indian tribes found in North America. It is, admittedly, a hefty bit of research.

I have not read on this topic but the land bridge may have been a primary, if not the only, migration conduit for all of North and South America.

It may also be the case, though I think there are no findings to support this, that homo sapiens appeared in North and South America around the same period that they did in Africa.

If this is the case (synchronous evolution as opposed to migration) you can only restructure a chronological hierarchy based on Carbon dating the skeletal remains of indigenous people of North and South America. But you still may have only a partial picture of chronology due to the migratory nature of the American Indian culture.

PBS recently broadcast a documentary called The Journey of Man, you can probably get it on DVD or your local library. It goes into great detail about what chris2a mentions above. The scientists in the documentary track groups of people from Africa to North America using DNA. It will sort of answer your question.

The arrival of humans in North America is estimated, if i recall correctly, at between 11,000 and 15,000 years ago. If the simple estimation that the earliest tribes slowly progressed south is correct (and it is consonant with Occam's razor), then tribes in South America would be the oldest. The Araucanian tribes of Chile in South America may be the oldest in the "new world," and were a very resourceful and fiercely independent group of tribes and clans. These tribes exist today, in a much attenuated form in Chile. At the time of the arrival of the Spanish, they covered Chile from five hundred miles north of what is today the capital at Santiago, to the islands north of the Strait of Magellan, and across the mountains to the east in what is now Argentina. "Mestizos" who were the descendants of Araucanian Indians and Spaniards became known as cauchos from the Auracanian word for a nomad, which is the origin of the word Gaucho, the Argentine equivalent of cowboy. Although Araucanian bands have almost disappeared from Argentina, their blood line survives there in the Gauchos and their descendants.

Without doubt, the most warlike tribe of Araucanians were the Mapuche. Before the arrival of the Spaniard, the Mapuche had successfully resisted the invasion of the Incas, whose army was nearly obliterated in battle, and the subsequent disasterous retreat through the deserts in the northern portion of what is now Chile. Although the Inca successfully established outposts north of the desert region, they never again attempted to cross the Rio Maule into the lakes district, which is "the garden of Chile." When the Spanish invaded in 1541, their experience was similar. Arriving less than a century after the Incas, they used the Inca road to march down the central valley, and Pedro de Valdavia founded Santiago in February of that year. He pushed south into the lakes district, and attacked the Mapuche strongholds. The tribesmen fell back before the Spaniard, but, as often as not, simply lured them into traps. They matched the Spanish cruelty for cruelty, and in 1553, Valdavia was tied to a tree and beheaded, a quaint form of execution which the Mapuche had learned from him.

For four hundred years, the Spanish presence in the rich valleys of the lakes district was an armed camp. Although they held the coast and both piracy and smuggling flourished, they were unable to make an impression militarily on the Mapuche. Ambrosio O'Higgins became Governor and Captain General of Chile in 1780, and he successfully negotiated peace with the Mapuche. His son, Bernardo O'Higgins, who, along with Jose de San Martin, became the "liberator" of Chile in 1817, pursued the same policy as his father, and largely left the Mapuche unmolested. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that Chilean settlers, heavily armed and heavily subsidized by the government at Santiago, finally succeeded in establishing settlements in Mapuche territory.

The Araucanians in general and the Mapuche specifically may not be the very oldest, but surely must be among the oldest human tribes in the Americas. I personally believe the Mapuche are surely the most heroic of those who resisted the European invasions.

THANK YOU FOR THAT IT WAS RELLY HELPFUL AND INFORMATIVE

Hey, easy on the caps. Stop pressing so hard.


Good luck with the research.

Take a look at the new book "1491" by Charles Mann. Very readable, despite its length, with a most interesting picture of both North and South America before Columbus. It has a whole bunch of surprises (including doing away with the land bridge theory (sorry, Chris2a). Talk about controversial books!

Ah yes. Well I tried to cover my _ss with the second theory. From what I now remember from college, it's not synchronous evolution. I believe the term is "spontaneous evolution". The basic idea, within the context of this thread, is that the origins of the human race may be traced back to more than one geographical location.

Using DNA sampleing, they now believe that less than 40 people crossed the land bridge.

Fewer than . . . if you're going to make outrageous claims, at least make your sentences grammatically correct, so that it doesn't distract from the blatant attempt to make a silly statement seem as though it were plausible.

Yep, that's what is left of a very bad paragraph...should have backspaced a few more times. This isn't the exact article that I read, but it will do.

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A new study of DNA suggests North America was originally populated by just a few dozen people who crossed a land bridge from Asia during the last Ice Age.

About 14,000 years ago, humans crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia to North America, most experts agree. But just how many intrepid explorers were involved in spawning subsequent populations has not been known.

Previous DNA analyses of the New World's founding looked at just one gene and assumed populations sizes have been constant over time. The new study looked at nine genomic regions to account for variations in single genes, and it assumed that sizes of founding populations change over time. The method favored actual genetic data over estimates used in previous calculations

"The estimated effective size of the founding population for the New World is about 70 individuals," said Jody Hey, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University.

Hey's calculations are also consistent with archeological evidence suggesting the initial settlement occurred around 12,000 to 14,000 years ago.

"The beauty of the new methodology is that it uses actual DNA sequences collected from Asian peoples and Native Americans, an approach that can provide a detailed portrait of historical populations," Hey said.

Hey focused on the genetics of Amerind-speaking populations, one of three major language groups in the New World representing the earliest migrants who extended deep into the Americas. The results are published in the June 2005 issue of the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Biology.

http://www.livescience.com/history/050525_america_settlers.html

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The Navaho were so named because they didn't stay in one place but wandered.

There are
Anglo Americans
Irish Americans
Italian "
African "
Native "
etc; etc;
Are there any American Americans?

We are all "American" Americans.

His work comes later (I know he visited with Queen Victoria) - but I recommend anyone studying this topic to read the writings of Black Elk. An amazing and profoundly meaningful insight.

Personally I'd not take "Black Elk Speaks" very seriously although it is a good read.