Americas: Holiday 101 Guide

Until recent decades, the late settlement theory prevailed, which maintains that human beings migrated to America from Asia via Beringia during the last ice age 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. However, traces indicating the presence of humans in the northern Yukon 24,000 years ago have been found. These data would suggest the crossing of humans from Siberia who would have occupied the now submerged territories of Beringia, and would have remained isolated by the glaciers some 8,000 years before dispersing in the rest of the American continent.

Scientists also support the thesis according to which the first settlement of America would have occurred 20,000 to 50,000 years earlier and would also be the result of a migration during which the human being would have taken different routes, such as as Mongolia, Siberia and the Arctic Ocean sea ice.

Subsequently, humans quickly occupied the entire continent where they formed various societies: in North America, the civilization of Mississippi and the city of Cahokia, the Iroquoian villages of Hochelaga and Stadaconé, as well as the Inuit, Dorset and Saqqaq cultures. In South America, the sacred city of Caral-Supe (the oldest American city) and the Sacred Valley of the Incas; in Mesoamerica, the Mayan cities of Chichén Itzá and Yaxchilan and the Aztec capital of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.

The Viking colonization of America is the first well-documented attempt at human settlement from Europe. According to the saga of Erik the Red, the first colonies were established in Greenland around the year 985 CE. His son, Leif Ericson, would then have explored Vinland (island of Newfoundland) around the year 1000 and would have entered into a relationship with the Beothuks. However, other pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contacts are presumed to have occurred even before the Scandinavian explorations.

The most developed civilizations of America, at the time of their encounter with Europeans, were not so technologically advanced as those of the Old World. For example, they had not developed the technology of the wheel and metallurgy had almost never any use other than decorative or monetary (notably in the form of coin axes): moreover, most Amerindians did not did not use a writing system, except in Mesoamerica, where they have been found on monuments as well as in codices.

However, this backwardness did not apply to all areas: certain American civilizations achieved a high degree of social organization and developed remarkable knowledge of astronomy and mathematics, as well as complex techniques of agriculture and architecture; thus, for example, the Aztec capital, Mexico-Tenochtitlan, was, when the Spaniards discovered it, one of the largest cities in the world, with an estimated population of about 200,000.