Rachel Wolf

26 September 2019
Reading Response

Meltzer chapter 6 looks at America’s origins and its consensus. He begins with a story about
Captain Cook and his observations of the different people he encountered during his travels. He
uses this to lead to the first consensus: Americans migrated from Asia. However, there are
always contrarian views. A major one is that there are archaeologists who think the first
Americans migrated from Europe. The evidence does not support this claim.
Rasmussen et al (2014) focuses the different hypotheses surrounding Clovis origins. The general
theory is that they migrated from Asia leading directly to Native Americans, but an alternative
hypothesis, Solutrean, proposes that the Clovis predecesors emigrated from southwestern Europe
during the Last Glacial Maximum. The site researched is from western Montana with human
remains dating to ~12,707-12,556 years BP. The remains are linked to contemporary Native
Americans.
Potter et al (2018) explore the multiple models for the peopling of the Americas. They analyze
the two major migration hypotheses: Ice-free corridor and the Pacific coastal routes. They
conclude that more research needs to be done to determine which route fits the data. One
possibility is that both routes were utilized by the first Americans.