Who moved into, across and within the Americas, from the first walkers and boat people out of Beringia to maize, the Taíno, the Thule and the Norse, then the great dying, the enslaved, the removed, the Atlantic and Pacific migrants, and the people still on the move today.
Stop 01 · c. 30,000–11,000 years ago
A Country Under the Sea
The story of the Americas starts on land you can no longer stand on. In the last Ice Age so much water was held in ice that the sea fell far below today's level. The shallow floors of the Bering and Chukchi seas dried out, and Siberia and Alaska became one country. People moved onto it from north-east Asia, and genetic studies suggest they then stopped for a long while. One analysis of Y chromosomes puts this 'Beringian standstill' at 2,700 to 4,600 years, time enough for a separate population to form. The idea is still argued over. Then the climate warmed, and by about 10,000 to 11,000 years ago the water had closed over the crossing for good.
The story of the Americas starts on land you can no longer stand on. In the last Ice Age so much water was held in ice that the sea fell far below today's level. The shallow floors of the Bering and Chukchi seas dried out, and Siberia and Alaska became one country. People moved onto it from north-east Asia, and genetic studies suggest they then stopped for a long while. One analysis of Y chromosomes puts this 'Beringian standstill' at 2,700 to 4,600 years, time enough for a separate population to form. The idea is still argued over. Then the climate warmed, and by about 10,000 to 11,000 years ago the water had closed over the crossing for good.
When did people get south of the ice? Clovis hunters, makers of fluted spear points, were once thought to be the first. Their tools are now dated to about 13,050 to 12,750 years ago. Then older-looking sites appeared. At White Sands in New Mexico, human footprints in lake beds have been dated with seeds, pollen and mud to around 21,000 to 23,000 years ago. Critics doubt those methods and ask why no tools have been found. Monte Verde in Chile, long placed at about 14,500 years, was challenged in Science in March 2026 by a team who put its occupation at 4,200 to 8,200 years ago. Its excavator and other archaeologists reject that. The first date remains open.
Two routes led south, and each has had its champions. The older idea was an inland corridor between the great ice sheets of Canada. Studies differ on when the ice parted, from about 14,800 to 13,000 years ago. A 2016 study then found that the passage, some 1,500 kilometres long, had no plants or animals to live on until around 12,600 years ago. Many researchers turned to the Pacific coast, where travellers could live on fish and kelp. Cooper's Ferry in Idaho gives them support: its lowest layers date to about 16,000 years ago, and the Columbia River may have been the way inland. There is a weakness. The old shoreline is drowned, so the evidence is mostly under the sea.
However they came, people ran the length of two continents. A 2018 ancient DNA study found that individuals from Chile, Brazil and Belize, 11,000 to 9,000 years old, shared ancestry with a Clovis-linked person from North America. Far to the south, at Tres Arroyos in Tierra del Fuego, charcoal and bone have been dated to about 12,500 years ago. The island may still have been joined to the mainland then. A Selk'nam tradition, written down by a missionary, says their ancestors walked in and could not walk back once the sea came through. The first arrivals were not the last. The same study found a continent-wide replacement of South Americans that began at least 9,000 years ago.
Plants travelled too. About 9,000 years ago, in south-western Mexico, farmers began turning a wild grass called teosinte into maize. It set off before it was finished. Still only partly domesticated, it had reached South America by at least 7,000 years ago, and the crop was completed and improved there as well. Then came a surprise: DNA from old cobs in a Honduran rock shelter suggests people carried better South American maize back towards Mexico. Northward, it was being grown in New Mexico and Arizona around 4,100 years ago. Eastern North America took it up on a large scale only around 900 CE, and forests were cleared to plant it. By then, people and seeds had crossed much of both continents.
The Caribbean was settled twice, and from different directions. The first people boated to Cuba about 6,000 years ago, carrying stone tools, and slowly spread east. Where they started is unclear, though artefacts from Belize hint at Central America. Then, some 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, farmers and potters related to Arawak speakers arrived. They seem to have come from the interior of north-east South America, down the Orinoco to the Venezuelan coast. From there they went north, settled Puerto Rico and spread west. The Taíno descended from these farmers. They grew cassava and paddled dugouts that could hold over a hundred people. Pottery styles kept changing, but the DNA shows no new migration behind them. Only the fashions moved.
Around the year 1000 a small party arrived from the east. Norse settlers had reached Greenland under Erik the Red. According to the sagas, Bjarni Herjólfsson sighted land further west in the 980s, and Leif Erikson explored it about 15 years later. The proof lies at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, found in 1960 by Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad: eight sod buildings, boat rivets, iron slag, and a spindle whorl that hints at women among the crew. In 2021 scientists counted tree rings out from a cosmic-ray spike in 993 and showed that wood there was cut in 1021. With no farms or graves, the site looks like a winter base and boat repair yard. The Norse left, and their foothold faded.
As the Norse faded, another people came along the top of the world. The Thule, ancestors of today's Inuit, spread from coastal Alaska with large skin boats called umiaks, kayaks, floated harpoons and dog sleds. Together these let crews hunt bowhead whales. Older accounts date their move east to before 1100, while newer work places it in the 13th century, and they reached Greenland by then. Why they went is unsettled: whales, warmer seas and the search for iron have all been proposed. The Arctic already had people. The Dorset, a Paleo-Inuit culture, had been there for thousands of years. The two may have overlapped by up to 150 years, and experts disagree about what happened. By about 1500 the Dorset were gone.
The conquests have their own tour on this site. Here the question is who came. On his second voyage, in 1493, Columbus brought more than a thousand men in 17 ships, among them carpenters and stonemasons as well as soldiers. Their town of La Isabela on Hispaniola was empty by 1500, but Santo Domingo took its place. That April, Pedro Álvares Cabral touched the coast of Brazil and claimed it for Portugal. Settlers followed slowly, some 2,000 a year from all Europe before 1580. Spaniards and Portuguese made up 87 per cent of the 446,000 who left Europe by 1640. In the 16th century women never passed 30 per cent of Spanish emigrants, and Andalusia alone sent up to half.
Disease crossed with the ships. An epidemic, perhaps influenza, struck La Isabela in 1493, and smallpox broke out on Hispaniola in 1518. People in the Americas had never met these infections, and epidemics came in wave after wave. War, enslavement and hunger followed them. Nobody counted the dead, so all figures are estimates. A 2019 University College London study pooled 119 regional estimates and reached about 60 million people in 1492, with a middle range of 45 to 78 million. Its authors concluded that about 90 per cent were gone within a century. Local numbers can be far smaller: DNA suggests 10,000 to 50,000 people lived on Hispaniola and Puerto Rico before Columbus. As one geneticist said, that does not make the erasure less significant.
For about three centuries, the largest movement across the Atlantic was forced. Between 1525 and 1866 about 12.5 million Africans were put on ships for the Americas, and about 10.7 million survived the voyage. The Atlantic slave trade has a full tour of its own here, so this stop gives only the scale. Enslaved Africans brought to the Americas before 1820 outnumbered Europeans by about three to one. Close to half of all captives went to Brazil. Only about 388,000 were landed directly in North America. For much of the colonial age, then, the typical newcomer to the Americas was an African in chains. Brazil was the last country here to abolish slavery, in 1888.
Some of the enslaved moved on their own terms. They fled to forests and mountains and built Maroon communities out of many African traditions. Palmares, begun around 1605 in the hills of north-east Brazil, may have held about 11,000 people by the 1690s. Its main settlement fell only in 1694. Near Cartagena, the people of San Basilio de Palenque came to terms with Spanish rule between 1713 and 1717, and they still keep their own creole language. In Jamaica, Maroons forced separate treaties from the British in 1739. In Suriname the Ndjuka and Saramaka won theirs from the Dutch in 1760 and 1762. Freedom had a price: Jamaica's first treaty obliged the Maroons to send back future runaways.
Further north, two tiny outposts altered the continent. In May 1607, 104 English men and boys chose the site of Jamestown in Virginia. Most of those there in the winter of 1609–10 died. In July 1608 Samuel de Champlain set up Quebec as a trading post. France sent few people, but from 1663 to 1673 about 800 women, the filles du roi, crossed with one-way passages. They made up nearly half of the women who settled in New France. Britain sent many more. Yet between 1620 and 1700, some 70 to 85 per cent of settlers in the Chesapeake and British West Indies arrived as indentured servants. The land was already lived on: in 1622 the Powhatan attacked and killed 350 to 400 colonists.
In 1830 the United States passed the Indian Removal Act, for moving nations of the South-East west of the Mississippi. The Choctaw went first, from late 1831. Most Muscogee Creeks had been taken by 1836, many in chains, and the Chickasaw from 1837 into the 1840s. Some 4,000 Seminoles were deported by 1842 after years of war. The Cherokee had a constitution, courts and a newspaper, and in 1832 the Supreme Court upheld their land rights. It did not save them. In 1838, 7,000 soldiers drove families into camps, and about 15,000 were forced out. The park service says many hundreds died; other estimates reach 4,000 or more. Some 60,000 people were removed in all.
When slavery ended in Britain's colonies, planters looked to India for workers. In May 1838 the Whitby and the Hesperus landed 396 Indians in British Guiana, only 22 of them women. By January, 48 were dead. The Fatel Razack reached Trinidad on 30 May 1845 with 225 more. The voyage took about three months, many died on the way, and contracts tied people to estates for five years at first. Strikes broke out on the plantations, and 15 Indians were killed at Rose Hall in 1913. By the time emigration stopped in 1917, about 240,000 had gone to British Guiana, 144,000 to 148,000 to Trinidad and 36,000 to Jamaica. Tens of thousands went home. Most stayed.
Between 1841 and 1884, an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people crossed the plains by wagon, a journey of four to six months. The Oregon Trail alone ran about 3,500 kilometres from Missouri to the Willamette Valley. Gold in California then drew some 300,000 people by 1855, from the eastern states, Latin America, Europe, Australia and China. In 1862 the Homestead Act offered 160 acres of public land for five years of living on it and working it. Canada made a similar offer in 1872, and its prairies filled with Ukrainians, Icelanders and others. These lands were already home to Native nations. The gold rush sped the decline of California's peoples, and prairie settlement rested on Indigenous displacement.
Asia sent people too. Between 1847 and 1874 about 141,000 Chinese contract labourers, by one count, were shipped to Cuba's sugar fields, and from 1849 some 80,000 to 100,000 to Peru. Others crossed to California. By 1867 Chinese workers were 90 per cent of the Central Pacific Railroad's workforce. In 1882 the United States banned Chinese labourers for ten years, and the ban was made permanent in 1902. Japanese migrants came later. The Kasato Maru reached Santos on 18 June 1908 with 781 contract emigrants, and Brazil now has more people of Japanese origin than any country but Japan. In the United States, about 122,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forced into camps in 1942. Nearly 70,000 of them were American citizens.
Many Europeans chose the southern half of the Americas. Between 1857 and 1920 Argentina took in about 5.2 million immigrants, some 45 per cent Italian and 31 per cent Spanish, though nearly half of all its immigrants later left. By 1914 almost 30 per cent of Argentines were foreign-born, twice the share in the United States. In Buenos Aires it was about half. The city's Hotel de Inmigrantes, opened in 1911, could house about 3,000 at a time. In Brazil the coffee planters of São Paulo, short of workers as the internal slave trade dried up, pressed for migrants. More than a million Italians arrived in the two decades before Italy banned subsidised emigration to Brazil in 1902.
The greatest stream still ran to the United States. Famine had already sent the Irish, and after 1880 more than 23 million people immigrated within 50 years. Italians numbered about four million between 1880 and 1920, and about half went home. Over two million Jews left the Russian Empire, driven by poverty, family networks and pogroms, and about nine in ten stayed. On 1 January 1892 Ellis Island opened in New York harbour. A teenager from County Cork was first through. More than 12 million people would pass through, and more than half of all arrivals from 1892 to 1924 used it. Canada had its own record year in 1913, with 400,810 newcomers. Then the door swung shut, as laws of 1921 and 1924 imposed quotas by nationality.
One of the largest American journeys never crossed a border. Between 1910 and 1970 an estimated six million Black Americans left the South. They were escaping racial violence and Jim Crow laws, and looking for work and schools. The First World War opened jobs in northern steel, meatpacking and car plants, while the boll weevil ruined cotton farms at home. The first wave made for New York, Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh. Detroit's Black population rose from about 6,000 in 1910 to some 120,000 by 1929. After 1940 many more went west, to Oakland, Los Angeles and Seattle, drawn by defence work. By 1970 the Black share of the South's people had fallen from 29.8 per cent to 19.1.
After 1942 much of the movement ran within the Americas. The Bracero Program issued about 4.6 million contracts to some 2.2 million Mexican workers up to 1964. Puerto Ricans, already US citizens, took six-hour flights, and New York's Puerto Rican population grew to nearly 900,000 by the mid-1960s. About 250,000 Cubans left between 1959 and 1962. A 1965 US law ended national origin quotas and set the first limit on the Western Hemisphere. Mexicans in the United States numbered under a million in 1970 and peaked at 12.8 million in 2007. South America had its own currents: Argentina's 2022 census counted over 522,000 Paraguayans. In 2026 governments in Latin America and the Caribbean reported nearly seven million Venezuelan refugees and migrants.
The people who came first are on the move as well. Between 1950 and 1968 almost 200,000 Native people moved, many under federal relocation, to cities such as Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. In 1940 only 8 per cent of American Indians and Alaska Natives lived in metropolitan areas. Now more than seven in ten do. In 2020 the census counted 9.7 million people who named that heritage, alone or in combination, and Cherokee was the largest group among them. The removed nations endure in Oklahoma and their old homelands. Inuit, direct descendants of the Thule, live across the Arctic those travellers crossed. Descendants of the first peoples live across both continents, and the first families' road runs back to Beringia.