The Long Argument About Origins

The question of where the first Americans came from has been argued about since the earliest European colonizers first encountered the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and began to wonder how those peoples had come to be there.

Early European theories — some seriously argued, some fantastical — proposed origins ranging from the lost tribes of Israel to the survivors of Atlantis to Phoenician traders to East Asian voyagers.

These theories reflected the limited understanding of deep human history available in the pre-scientific era, and they also reflected the specific cultural frameworks through which European observers interpreted a world that did not fit their prior experience.