President's claim on 'Native Americans' not supported by growing evidence
A few weeks ago, during an immigration-focused speech in Las Vegas, President Barack Obama made the assertion that “unless you were one of the first Americans, a Native American, you came from some place else; somebody brought you.” This sort of opinion is widely held and vehemently defended by various tribal groups here in the states. The truth is, this idea should be questioned, and a new question should be asked: Were Caucasians or Native Americans the first to arrive in the New World?
Recently, evidence has been mounting of groups that predated American Indian tribes. Theories of Caucasians settling North American include the Solutrean hypothesis and those regarding the Clovis culture. The Solutrean theory, postulated by Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution and Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter, hypothesizes that Ice Age Europeans migrated to the Americas. Much of the evidence for the theory is derived from the findings of core-flint tools, like those from Europe, that for years were ignored. Recently, similar tools were found in six locations along the east coast, dating from 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, the same era they were used in Europe and predating the American Indians by around 10,000 years. Additional evidence for this theory was presented in the BBC documentary “Stone Age Columbus.” Consider also the so-called Kennewick Man found in Washington State in 1996. Besides predating Indians in that part of the U.S., a Smithsonian article by James Chatters related that his features appeared caucasoid. The Mahaffy Cache in Colorado unearthed Clovis-era tools with horse, camel and sheep residue that dated to about 13,000 years ago — animals that had disappeared by the arrival of the “Native Americans.” Other Clovis-era sites are currently being researched, including the Topper Dig here in South Carolina. Perhaps the strongest evidence for pre-Indian civilization in the U.S. comes from genetic testing. The Windover people of Florida, whose DNA has been found preserved in a peat bog, have apparently no biological affiliation with the Florida Indian groups. In addition, DNA testing of the Ichigua people has found European lineage, too old to have been mixed at Christopher Columbus’ arrival in North America in the late 1400s.
Not surprisingly, the tribal peoples of the United States are less than thrilled with these recent discoveries. These hypotheses are inconvenient if one wishes to purport that America was founded on white settlers massacring poor natives, especially as it appears that these original civilizations were wiped out by the current tribes. While Native American tribes were here before the pilgrims, perhaps people should also consider that Caucasians were probably here before them, and they too suffered the repercussions of some “illegal immigration.”
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