Lecture 1: Native Americans Flashcards
What happens to glaciers during the Ice Age?
Glaciers are able to expose more land
What happens to sea levels when glaciers are formed?
They decrease and expose more land
Why would an ice age allow early hunter-gatherers to cross from Siberia to Alaska?
Water levels decrease due to glaciers forming, causing a bridge between Alaska and Siberia to form
How many years ago did humans inhabit North America?
15000-100000 years ago
How many routes did migrants take to settle in North America?
3 different routes
What is radiocarbon dating? How does this technique work? What is a half-life?
an Isotope of Carbon called C-14 present in the atmosphere in small amounts. It’s found in fossils, the carbon decreases at a fixed rate over time. A half-life is the amount of time it takes for one-half of an isotope to decay.
What other methods did researchers use to discover Native American Origins?
Spear heads
DNA Research (Certain genetics on Y chromosomes only exist in indigenous populations)
Linguistic evidence: a lot of time must’ve passed for 300-400 languages to evolve
When did the earliest humans arrive in New Mexico?
23,000 years ago
Who was the conquistador who attacked the Aztecs in 1519?
Hernan Cortes
Who was the conquistador who attacked and defeated the Incas?
Francisco Pizzaro, used the same strategies as Cortes
What advantages did Jared Diamond state the Spanish had over the Native Americans
horses to gain height advantage and cover land
steel weaponry and armor
What percentage of Native Americans died from disease?
80-95% of Columbian native populations of 50-60 million
Why does Diamond argue that the geography and the shape of the continents helped the Spaniards build greater resistance to disease?
Shifting vertically keeps the environment changing i.e. weather, natural disasters, temps, etc.
Shifting horizontally keeps the environment near similar.
Where did the world’s most domesticated animals originate?
The old world. Only the alpaca originated in the west
Why did Spain’s access to domesticated animals provide an advantage?
It’s much easier to spread crops and animals and technology along similar lines of latitude. Viruses are also able to mutate to infect humans.
