Depends on essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Depends on - Essay Example Much later in around 1,000 BCE other groups like Scandinavians, Norsemen from northern Europe settled in the Atlantic coast of North America. Now the questions remains that if all these early settlements are considered then what is the significance of 1492, the year in which Columbus â€Å"discovered† America. While some might say that Columbus’s landing in America is less significant in the history of the New World than the pre-Christ early invasions, there are others who argue that today people are simple biased with anything concerned with Europeans (Unger, 2002, pp.1-2). The Indians living in America are considerably late settlers from the Old World where it is considered human species have evolved. According to archaeologists, people from different parts of the Old World have settled in America as long back as 40,000 years ago. The Indian people found in America today may have been the descendants of these early settlers although in later periods another group who were Athapasken-speakers settled in and around western Canada and Alaska. Both these Indians and the Athapasken-speakers have physical resemblance with modern day Chinese, Koreans and the Japanese. These migrant groups survived mainly on roots, berries, seeds and fish. It is assumed that due to several factors like paucity of rainfall and lack of food supply these migrants were forced to move towards North America. In those days, sea level was low and a land bridge connected Alaska with Siberia. Within the next few thousand years, these groups of people moved further south till the southe rn tip of South America. Simultaneously to these movements, the population of these migrants swelled and while they were few hundred in the beginning, by the time it was 1492 the number swelled to 50 million or more, a population size that can be compared to modern day Europe (Unger, 2002, p.2). With population rapidly increasing over the centuries, these people who were originally from the