Migration Theories - Knowledge Check Page

"According to the Asian migration hypothesis ... thousands of years ago, when the climate facilitated access to northwestern America, people from Asia tracking game crossed land bridges freed from ice to reach the central and southern parts of the continent.  (QEP, page 19).  Various waves of migration have been documented, and exact dates for the earliest migrations range from 10,000 B.C. to as much as 30,000 years. As new archeological sites are studied, as information about what routes were open at the time is revised, alternative migration theories using other access points are proposed.

But why would people have migrated towards the south and east in the first place?  Why leave what are now northern Asia and the Beringia areas at all? One idea stems from the idea that the ice sheets were constantly changing, and the weather was slowly becoming colder or hotter.  Over time people moved to more habitable climates, gradually changing position around the globe. 

Similarly, these changes might have also influenced wildlife: herds of caribou, bison, and in those times even groups of large woolly mammoths or saber-toothed wildcats. All of these animals might have moved slowly from one region to another, because of their changing environment and landscape.  And one idea is that just as slowly people may have followed these groups of animals into their new territories.  A related idea suggests that humans themselves contributed to the animals' movement, through overhunting. Indeed, many of the larger species just mentioned went extinct during these time periods. As animal numbers dwindled in one area, people might have had to move on to another area to find food.

It should be noted that many Indigenous cultures do not require the inclusion of this migration theory from the northwest to explain their existence in what is now Canada.  Even while recognizing notions of shifting hunting grounds and of changing of territory, for food or other reasons, “Indigenous people throughout the Western Hemisphere talk [instead] of their origins in oral histories, stories, and myths that link them [more] intimately to the places they inhabit. The land, the stories commonly assert, was made for “the people,” and they [the people] were made to inhabit the land. Every group has an origin story […] And these stories are invoked by Aboriginal peoples as sufficient to their needs as regards history.”  (Source)

Another related consideration might be to question why non-Indigenous people tend not to include their own migration experiences, from Africa to Europe let's say, as part of their own historical textbooks and records. While the "expansion of the modern human population is thought to have begun 45,000 years ago, and it may have actually taken 15,000–20,000 years for Europe to be colonized.  (Source)