CanyonWind wrote:
There aren't too many people in the world living on places that weren't obtained by murder and genocide, maybe the Eskimos. Those indians that met the pilgrims, how did they get control of that piece of land? I imagine they took it from somebody else.
LOL> Most recent archealogical evidence of early Americans suggest that, in fact, the Americans who were living here at the time of the Pilgrims most likely killed off the people who were here before them. What we today call "Native Americans" (including Eskimos) have DNA markers that genetically trace them back to Siberia. Yet all the
earliest American skeletons and skulls are distinctly non-Siberian, but rather show distinct traits unique to ancient Japanese and Pacific Islanders related to ancient Japanese. Moreover, these earliest skeleton share another commonality - they all show evidence of violent deaths by human-made weapons or other similar blunt force injury. Since there are no DNA traces in today's Native American that link them to any early Japanese or Pacific Rim group, archealogists think now that when Siberians began to spread across the Americas, they killed off those earlier Americans rather than assimulating them. Seeing that these Siberian descendants were also frequently violent among themselves, it seems highly plausible. In fact, we know conflict between Siberian-descending tribes, both in North and South America, was so brutal and malicious that at times it was very close to a form of genocide - so we definitely know that Europeans do not have a monopoly on such atrocities.
Another thing to consider is that those earliest AMericans may have been so early that they technically didn't migrate as the Siberian would have, due to how the continents were linked by ice or a shorter distance. For all we know, those earliest Americans, though appearing to be related to ancient Pacific Rim groups, may have been authentically "aboriginal" to the Americas. And if the Siberians did succeed in killing them off completely - something the Europeans weren't able to do to the Siberians - then we know who to hand the genocide crown to, don't we?