Paleo Indians in Virginia.... The first people to occupy Virginia, known as Paleo-Indians, came here from elsewhere - but where, and how did they get here? Perhaps they came to North American originally across the Bering land bridge. Perhaps 25,000 years ago, Siberians migrated into Beringia, where they stayed for 10,000 years during the during the Last Glacial Maximum. An ice-free corridor opened up down to California along the edge of the Pacific Ocean roughly 17,000 years ago, and as the ice sheets melted an inland route opened up roughly 13,000 years ago. An alternative possibility is that the first people in North America migrated along the Atlantic coastline, hunting marine mammals at the edge of the ice. The Clovis points found in some of the earliest archeological sites in North American, and perhaps the point dredged up together with mammoth remains off the coast of Cape Charles, might be consistent with the theory that North America was settled by people from the Solutré region in France. What we do know is that the first immigrant humans to settle in Virginia, arriving as early as 15,000 years ago, were hunters. Odds are, they traveled widely in family-based groups, acquiring food in various places and then moving to new places when local resources were exhausted. Shelter would have been very limited - some Virginia caves and rock overhangs were used, but there were few such sites especially east of the Blue Ridge). Hunting groups may have looked for places where windstorms had knocked down enough trees to create dry spots for a few individuals, and set up temporary camps with a natural wooden roof.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 02:49:10 +0000
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