Module 1: The First North Carolinians No reading with this PowerPoint

Who Were They and Where did They Come From? Answer: It is believed that the 1 st Americans were from Asia. They were also hunters. The Next Slide shows what the earth looked like during the last Ice Age…

When Did The First Americans Come? Most anthropologists believe that the main migratory stream from Asia lasted from about 13,000 B.C. to 9,000 B.C. – Hunters traveled across a 100 mile land bridge “Birengia” – Glaciers melted and the rising ocean waters submerged the land bridge and created the Bering Strait 2 nd Migratory Movement –around 6,000 B.C. -Now Traveling across water -Probably became Navajos, Apache 3 rd Migratory Movement –around 3,000 B.C. -They became Inuit -”Eskimos”

Bering Strait Today

How and Why Did They Come? Answer: Most probably came by foot. – Archaeological evidence suggests that these Asian hunters were following herds of large game across a 100 mile-wide land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.

How Do We Know? We obviously don’t have writings from these Native Americans, but the reason that the “Bering Land Bridge” theory has been widely accepted is because physical evidence in the form of a spear point was first found in Clovis, New Mexico in After finding this first spear point, archeologists have discovered points along this Bering path. Since then, a large number of spear points (dating to be approximately 12,000 years old) have been found throughout North America. This includes North Carolina! – Some spear points have been found near the remains of large fauna (large animal fossils) such as Mastodons and Mammoths

Below are approximate locations of Clovis site and the Clovis spear point

What type of game was hunted with the Clovis Point?

Did You Notice On Slide 9 that there was a smaller point known as a Folsom Point? -This point is much smaller and was not quite as old. -Overall, the size of the points decreased dramatically over the next several thousands of years. Why? -Well, some scientists believed that these points represented different cultural migrations, but as you probably already guessed, larger points were not as useful as these animals were over-hunted to the point of extinction. What remained were much smaller animals. As a result, the spear points were not as large.

Smaller animals (like the Bison) did not require as large of a spear point