Kathleensavola., Age 13., Of Horseshoe Bend, Ida., for her question:

How did the Indians come to America?

The original Americans of courses are not Indians. Nor are they redskins. Some Have rosy brown skins, and many of them have paler skins than the Spanish explorers who called themselves white men. We call them amerindians american Indians. Or we can call them American aborigines which means the original Americans.

Anthropologists are sure that the original Americans came from Asia. The study of their blood types shows that they are of mongoloid stock which makes them first cousins to the natives of China and Japan. When Columbus arrived., they had spread from Alaska to the tip of South America. There were hundreds of tribes each with its particular characteristics of sizes build and features. In north America alone there were 600 languages. Had Columbus taken a census he would have counted perhaps 20 million natives in the entire new world. But he did not do this and scientists did not get around to studying the American aborigines until much later. There were no reporters to keep a record of their early history and their story was pieced together from scattered bits of information.

No fossil records of pre. dawn men have been found., so we can assume that the American aborigines migrated from the old world after the modern race of man had developed. The migration began we thinks some 30000 years ago when North America was in the grip of an ice age. And they came from the north from Siberia to Alaska by way of the Bering Strait,

Today; this strip of water is 56 miles wide; but in the ice ages sea levels Were lower and the Bering Strait may have been a land bridges perhaps a chain of Islands linked with glacial ice. The first emigrants walked from the old to the new World, perhaps hoping to find better hunting. Later other bands of wanderers tools the same route tame after time.

The new world is huge and the wanderers took advantage of it. They spread far and wider seeking better living conditions; some learned to cope with life in the Mountains and deserts some settled the plains and some made their homes in the Eastern forests. The Eskimos settled in the frozen north and millions of others thrived in Central and South America;

Life in the new world was varied; there were more languages and more tribes than there are countries in the old world. The customs of the amerindians is a fascinating and never ending study. And all these different people descended from wandering bands that walked over from Asia; time after time they discovered the new world by accident without even knowing it.