Where Did Native Americans Come From? The Untold Story of the First Peoples

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. The show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. The pre-Columbian history of the Americas has remained one of the most mysterious eras of the human story, or so we’ve been taught. Here to tell the story is Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson, who holds a PhD in cell and developmental biology from Harvard. He is also the author of They Had Names: Tracing the History of the North American Indigenous People. Let’s take a listen.

I grew up knowing next to nothing about pre-European North America. Because I was homeschooled. We spent plenty of time supplementing the curriculum with books from the local Racine, Wisconsin, Public Library and with activities to learn about Native American cultures at the time of European contact. As a youth, I reveled in teepees, wigwams, and longhouses, but especially in weapons and warpaint, buckskins, and moccasins, and all the other clever ways that the indigenous people came up with to survive and thrive in North America. Yet lingering in the background was an empty void for the time period preceding the arrival of the Pilgrims. Who was here? What were they doing?

What happened?

I went off to a small Christian high school in tiny Union Grove, Wisconsin, where history class made the void even bigger and put tangible categories on the darkness that I could not grasp. For Europe, we were awash in maps of Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Franks. We watched the maps change as one kingdom rose and fell after another. We learned the names of the kings and conquerors: Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Charlemagne. We were bored with dates and facts, specific signposts of a larger narrative that unfolded over thousands of years. Yet in North America, I had no maps, no visuals of the rise and fall of kingdoms, no names of rulers and heroes, no chronological list of dates and facts. It wasn’t boring; it was a mystery. My family heritage made this mystery even more vexing. My mother’s relatives lived in Germany. We’d visit them about once a year. In Germany, old castles and old cathedrals were everywhere. It was like a gong that kept ringing each time I turned my head, reminding me that Europe had an old history. Back in the States, I’d turned my head, and there was silence. Yes, I could visit Plymouth Plantation and other post-contact sites, but where were the pre-contact ruins? Where were the reminders of thousands of years of Native American history? I lived with this void for most of my life. About ten years ago, the void began to be illuminated. I moved to small-town Burlington, Kentucky, visited our local library, and wandered through the history section when Charles Mann’s book 1491 just happened to catch my eye. The subtitle promised something I had been looking for much of my life: new revelations of the Americas before Columbus. From Mann, I learned that there were a lot more people here in the Americas than originally thought, and then after Europeans arrived, 80 percent to 90 percent of them disappeared. I also learned that these masses of people transformed their environments in ways no one had realized before. Even and the Amazon was not the pristine wilderness we were once led to believe; it was cultivated like a garden. Is interesting. Professionally, I’m a biologist and geneticist. About seven years ago, I was trying to work out the details for the family tree of humanity, a family tree based on DNA. Where to put the start for the tree, and how was the generation-by-generation history of humanity embedded in the branches? The answers emerged thanks to a lesson I had learned from Charles Mann’s book. I knew the Native American population had collapsed after Columbus. Where was the genetic smoking gun of this event? I eventually discovered it, and then the answers to my other questions fell into place. But the genetics of Native Americans weren’t just a useful tool to a bigger scientific pursuit. Native American DNA itself held secrets, shocking ones that I would soon learn to the pre-European past of this continent. Over the last several years, I’ve dug deep into the genetics of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, as well as into their linguistic relationships, archaeological ruins, and even their own histories of migration. I’ve visited sites across the country. I’ve even been invited to speak on these new discoveries to a gathering of one of the more famous tribes of the Great Plains: the Lakota Sioux. The narrative that you’re about to hear represents the results of this thrilling, frustrating, and sometimes terrifying quest for answers. The earliest North American civilization arose, of all places, in northeastern Louisiana. You can still visit Poverty Point and its mounds and concentric half-circles of earthworks. It might not seem as impressive today, but 3,000 years ago, it was part of an economic network stretching 620 miles. Just for prospective, if you go 620 miles due north of Poverty Point, you end up almost in Wisconsin. 620 miles to the northeast takes you into Virginia. Going 620 miles due east puts you on the Atlantic. The builders of Poverty Point knew the sky. They knew it so well that they aligned their earthwork constructions to it, specifically to the equinoxes. By the 700s BC, Poverty Point was fading into the annals of history. A few centuries later, another group of builders, equally conscious of the heavens, erected another network of mounds. The epicenter of the Hopewell culture was Ohio. Several sites—Newark, to the east of Columbus; Chillicothe, to the south of Columbus; and Fort Ancient, to the northeast of Cincinnati—are now recognized UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Hopewell builders constructed geometric mounds, circles, octagons, and squares. One of the Newark earthworks is aligned to the 18.6-year cycles of the Moon. I didn’t even know that the Moon had 18.6-year cycles, but these guys did, and they moved large amounts of earth to permanently record these phenomena.

When we come back, more of the story here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get our podcasts. Any story you missed or want to hear again can be found there daily. Again, please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast anywhere you get your podcasts. It helps us keep these great American stories coming. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

By the early AD 400s, Hopewell was gone. And this is where the story gets interesting, because this is where genetics enters the picture, and we get answers to the question of who is here. For the past eight years, I have been using male-inherited Y-chromosome DNA to study Native American history. In other words, I have been following paternal genealogies with genetics. Today, in North America, all the Native American Y-chromosome lineages are younger than the fall of Hopewell. When Poverty Point and Hopewell were flourishing, none of the contemporary genetic lineages existed in the Americas. In other words, genetics reveals the existence of invaders. The AD 400s mark a crucial turning point in the Americas. Whoever lived before, whoever rose and fell—their origins, their genealogical relationships—have all disappeared from the Y-chromosome genetic record. I don’t know who built Poverty Point. I don’t know who built Hopewell, but I do know who invaded. Just a few centuries after Christ, in the AD 400s, in Europe, the Roman Empire was beginning to crumble. Germanic tribes were invading from the east. An obscure but fierce Central Asian people, the Huns, also rampaged through Europe and accelerated the fall of the Romans. It was relatives of the Huns who also want the opposite direction: eastward, away from Europe, away from Central Asia, away from China, across the Bering Strait into the Americas. And just like the Huns, they left destruction in their wake, but their descendants also left construction and creation in their wake. On the Iowa side of the Mississippi River, just across from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, sits Effigy Mounds National Monument. These mounds aren’t geometric. Instead, they are shaped like animals or people. They don’t seem to be aligned to the heavens, but they do seem to carry a message. When I visited Effigy Mounds National Monument, I discovered that the park contains several types of mounds, not just effigy mounds. Effigy Mounds date from the AD 700s or later. The other mounds date earlier, even into the BC era. The older mounds tend to be found right on the cliffs overlooking the Mississippi, the positions of prominence. The Effigy Mounds are found farther back. It was obvious to me that the Effigy Mounds could have been built in many places along the Mississippi, but they seemed to favor hugging sites already in existence. It made me think that relatives of the Huns came in, overthrew whoever was here before, and then tried to stake claims of legitimacy by taking the mantle of earlier people groups. I know at least one contact-era Indian tribe who can trace their ancestry back to the times of the Effigy Mounds. The Siouan-Catawban language grouping includes some of the more famous tribes of the Great Plains and surrounding regions: Lakota, Dakota, Osage, Crow, Mandan, Hidatsa, Assiniboine, and Winnebago. Their ancestors have a history going back to at least the AD 800s, but they weren’t the builders of the effigy mounds in the AD 800s. The Siouan-Catawbans weren’t in Wisconsin, but on the Atlantic, near where modern Washington, D.C., now sits. The AD 400s invasion of North America wasn’t the last. No, I’m not talking about the arrival of Europeans 1,000 years later. Just a few centuries after the Hunnic invasion, in the AD 900s, another invasion happened, one of the most significant because it brought to North America a group of record keepers whose skills would shine a spotlight on the formerly dark centuries of the pre-European past.

In European history, the AD 900s aren’t as well known as the AD 400s. The AD 900s are near the end of the Viking Era, not the Roman Era, but there are parallels. During the Middle Ages, migrants from the East entered the European continent. Magyars, the ancestors of modern Hungarians, as well as lesser-known Turkic groups like the Oghuz and Kipchaks, moved westward from Central Asia. At the same time, another group of Central Asians moved eastward. The ancestors of modern Native American groups like the Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Ojibwe, Menominee, Miami, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Delaware, Narragansett, and others—all members of the Algic language family. They first landed in the frigid Alaskan Arctic. They were met by people who had preceded them at contact. Members of the Eskimo-Aleut language family resided along the Alaskan coast. Their relatives reached all the way to Greenland. Genetics plants the Eskimo-Aleut in the New World before the Algics arrived. Archaeology suggests that a group of Eskimo-Aleut left Alaska and went eastward right around the time that the Algics landed. The Algics’ own records speak of a military victory at contact. The interior of Alaska was dominated by members of the Aak Athabaskan language family. The ancestors of the Navajo and Apache, both of whom belonged to the Aak Athabaskan language family, were likely up north at this time. Genetics indicates that this cluster of tribes preceded the arrival of the Algics in North America. They may also have been the losers in the Algics’ early clashes. The band of Algic ancestors didn’t migrate across the North American continent as a unified group with regular frequency. Splinter groups formed, giving rise to pockets of tribes encountered at contact. One of the earliest splits spawned the Yurok and Wiyot people at contact. These tribes were on the northwestern California coast. When they first broke away, they left the remainder of the tribe known as Algonquians, near the Alaska-Canada border. In terms of calendar dates, we’re still in the mid-eight-eight-nine-hundreds. Over the next 70 to 100 years, the Algonquin records are troubled. “Much evil,” their words, took place. Geographically, they were likely in what is now British Columbia in western Canada at contact. Part of this region was the domains of members of the Salish language family. Growing up, I never learned much about the tribes in the Pacific Northwest. Salish would have been unfamiliar to me. Apparently, the Salish came to the Northwest from somewhere else; their own migration histories suggest an origin much farther east, perhaps in modern Minnesota, but by the time the Algonquins arrived, the Salish were likely in place. Eventually, the “much evil” subsided, the Algonquins enjoyed peace, and another splinter group arose. The time frame is the AD 1000s. The place: the Rocky Mountain region of modern Idaho and Montana. The people: the ancestors of the Blackfeet. Around the time that the Blackfeet and Algonquians parted ways, the latter took up farming. In the first part of the AD 1100s, the Algonquian farmers hit a setback—drought and a common reaction to it: internal conflict and separation. At this point, the ancestors of the Arapaho, Grovon, and Cree left the main body of Algonquians. I guess this split got rid of the troublemakers, or at least its separated factions, because the latter half of the AD 1100s describes a renewal of the peace.

And what a rich and complicated tapestry it is! Indeed. And my goodness, this is not history you’re going to get anywhere else, folks, on any dial. And this gives much more richness, complexity, and wealth to the story of this country and how it started, and how far back the very first people who traveled across this country were alive. The idea of these early settlements in Louisiana 700 BC, Poverty Point, and then Hopewell, Ohio. These are stories I’d never heard of before. When we come back, more of the story here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories. And you’ve been listening to Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

By the early AD 1200s, though, the Algonquins were on the Great Plains where they ran into new enemies—well, some may have been old enemies. One foe they described as the North Walkers. I suspect these were the Athabaskans, originally from up in Alaska and northern Canada, now migrating south—likely the ancestors of the Navajo and Apache. The Algonquins used several terms for their enemies: strong stone, snakes, and invaders. These may have been Shoshone. Their linguistic relatives, the Aztecs of Mexico, arrived with the relatives of the Huns in the AD 400s. Regardless of who exactly the Algonquins fought. By the mid-AD 1200s, they tired of war and went east to the Mississippi. Well, most of them did. Here again, another subgroup was of a different mind, and they split off. The ancestors of the Menominee and Cheyenne formed here in the early to mid-1200s. Later migrations at the Cheyenne would take them onto the Great Plains. The poor remaining Algonquins—all they sought was relief along the Mississippi—and all they got was a massacre. The American Bottom would have been an inviting place to settle. The climate near modern Saint Louis’s—temperate and well-watered. Here the Missouri and Mississippi rippers come together; soil was fertile, game was abundant. But someone else had gotten there first, somewhat powerful. The Algonquians’ own records describe the rulers, but not with modern tribal names that we would recognize. The Telegas were the ones who, according to the Algonquians, possessed the East. Today, near modern Saint Louis. The ruins at Cahokia can still be visited by the public. I did so myself on a balmy spring day last year. Monks Mound, the largest earthwork in the entire Americas, contains 22 million cubic feet of dirt. The top of the mound is 100 feet in the air. You can see downtown Saint Louis and the Gateway Arch from its summit. In terms of population size, Cahokia once boasted a population of 10,000 to 15,000 people. This is small by modern standards, but by the standards of the AD 1200s, when Cahokia was at its peak, it was as big as London. Cahokia commanded an empire. It was part of the Mississippian culture, whose reach extended well to much of the East, from Saint Louis down to the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. From the western Arkansas border to the Atlantic Coast of South Carolina, the Mississippian peoples ruled all of what is now considered the Southeast. Cahokian influences were even felt as far north as Aztalan, a small site which sits between modern Madison and Milwaukee, just off I-94. Monks Mound is a flat-topped mound. The mounds at Aztalan are also flat-topped, not geometric or in the shape of animals. Flat-topped mounds can be found throughout the Southeast. Many are still accessible to the public. I’ve visited Moundville in Alabama, about one hour southwest of Birmingham and just south of Tuscaloosa. Moundville hosts at least 29 mounds, many of which are flat-topped. Who built Cahokia? Who were the Mississippians who possessed the East and massacred the Algonquians when they first arrived at the American Bottom?