American Origins: The Arrival of Homo sapiens in North America

Private Live Chat
June 23, 2026

MEntity: Hello to you, Connor. We are here, now. We can begin.

Connor B: 

Hello again, Michael.

I want to learn about the origins of human life in North America.

Hard evidence of Human activity in North America from before 30,000 years ago has yet to surface. No one has found a million-year-old Homo erectus skeleton in the Americas. I scoured the TLE archives and could not find any records of you describing a North American past life predating 30,000 years ago, with one possible exception: a past life of Janet E. who, to quote you, enjoyed watching woolly mammoth herds passing through an "Eden-like" area in present-day Colorado “before the coming Ice Ages would set in making that area uninhabitable and destroying many species over time.” You never specified when this mammoth-watcher lived, but your phrasing suggests it was long before the most-recent glacial period.

The narrative currently accepted by anthropologists is tied to the most-recent glacial period. According to this narrative, North America was first peopled by ancestor groups who used Beringia to cross from Siberia to Alaska during the Last Glacial Maximum (~20,000 BCE). From there, successive waves of descendants migrated across the continent towards the Atlantic and down the West Coast into South America. According to this narrative, no one lived in the Americas before that.

I think you would agree this crossing did indeed take place. No one seems to be disputing that except idiots who believe Earth is 5,000 years old. But I wonder if you would agree that a Beringia crossing during the Last Glacial Maximum marks the first time that Humans ever lived in North America.

I suspect ancient human activity in North America is older (and perhaps more cyclical) than the accepted narrative suggests, but in the absence of physical evidence I can do nothing more than suspect.

Can you describe the origins of human life and civilization in North America? Who were the first humans ever to live on this continent and how did they get here?

MEntity: 

It is true that North America was not first peopled only by the late Beringia crossing. It is also true that there is a layered, cyclical prehistory.

The Beringian migrations were real and important, but not the first human presence in North America. The Beringian migrations would be the most recent wave that left the clearest archeological trail. As we know our responses step into speculative history, we would also aim to keep one foot in evidence where possible. North America would have been populated in multiple waves, not just one. The mainstream model is strong with evidence for the ancestors of many later indigenous populations, particularly through the Beringia during the late Pleistocene, so we do not dismiss this. However, within our broader historical framework, there were earlier cycles of habitation with some being coastal, some inland, and some later erased by glaciation, flooding, and shifting coastlines.

Beringia was not the first time humans ever lived in North America, but it is fair to say it was the first time for which a large, durable, recoverable population history remains visible to modern archeology.

Earliest arrivals to what is known now as North America would have come from Northeast Asia, Siberia, by way of Beringia and then primarily down the Pacific coast. This was never one dramatic migration, but repeated movements of small populations over very long spans of time. We think the earliest arrivals to North America were drawn from populations already living in what is now Siberia, far eastern Russia, and adjacent parts of northeast Asia. They would not have been of a separate North American origin population, but extensions of broader Eurasian human dispersal. During glacial periods, sea levels would drop enough to expose the landmass you know as Beringia, linking Asia and Alaska. This was not a narrow bridge but a broad habitable region. Populations moved into it gradually, lived there for generations, then expanded eastward and southward when conditions allowed. For the earliest successful spread into the rest of North America, we think the route was the Pacific coastline using shorelines, estuaries, islands, and river mouths as corridors. Travel would have been a mix of walking along exposed coastal land, following river systems inland, and short-distance watercraft movement such as simple boats or skin vessels that hugged the coast rather than moving into open ocean voyaging.

Coastal people could move surprisingly far while remaining within familiar ecological zones but most of the evidence for such movement would now be underwater because those coastlines no longer exist in the same form.

Once populations were established in Alaska, western Canada, and the Pacific coast, they spread inland through those river corridors, plains, and interglacial openings.

"First arrival" was a gradual unfolding from northern and western footholds. Later, there were eastern coastal populations that were offshoots of the same larger human populations, but simply arriving by a different chain of movement. Humans from western Eurasia, the Mediterranean basin and northwest Africa reached parts of the Atlantic-facing Americas during much earlier climatic periods when coastlines, island chains, and sea levels were very different. This does not mean there were modern-style ocean crossings, but incremental coastal migration across landscapes and shelves that no longer exist in the same form.

We are delivering difficult data to unpack through our channel. It may not flow well. Does what you received make sense and do you have any questions about these responses?

Connor B: 

It makes sense so far. Can you specify when these earliest arrivals took place?

Also… "Humans from western Eurasia, the Mediterranean basin and northwest Africa reached parts of the Atlantic-facing Americas"

Can you elaborate on this?

Almost sounds like you're saying there were Romans or Carthaginians visiting the Americas long before Columbus or the Norse.

MEntity: No, we are not describing Romans, Carthaginians, or any other historically familiar Mediterranean culture sailing to the Americas in recognizable historical times. We are speaking of far older human populations ancestral to later Eurasian, Mediterranean, and North African peoples, though not those civilizations, themselves.

Connor B: Approximately when was this?

MEntity: We would place the earliest arrivals into North America around 100,000 years ago, though we think there were earlier presences of humans as far back as 120,000 years ago. It would have been something along the lines of around 100,000 years ago being the earliest scattered human presences in very small populations and not through continuous occupation. About 40,000 - 60,000 years ago is where more substantial wave or re-entries occurred, though still fragmented and quite vulnerable to climatic disruption. Maybe around 15,000 to 25,000 years ago comes the migrations that are most visible to current archeology, including the populations tied to Beringia and later dispersal through the Americas.

Connor B: 

None of the 1,000,000 BCE coastal civilizations had a presence in North America?

I'm referring to the sprawling cities that aligned with various chakras.

MEntity: Oh yes, they existed, but there was a massive era of time between then and the lineage of humans that could be connected to North America now. We were describing the waves of habitation, repopulation, and peoples that may have recoverable traces. To speak of the sprawling network is to explain a different arc of history. We know this may seem contradictory or discrepancy, but it is simply the response we gave in terms of how the question was presented to us through Troy. The civilizations referenced were long gone and we can elaborate upon this in further exchanges.

Connor B: 

Ah, okay.

In another exchange, then, I'd be interested to learn about earlier human activity in North America for which no trace remains.

That's not contradictory, I understand you.

MEntity: We understand.

+++

A note on terminology: I gravitate towards the term "glacial period" over "Ice Age." Technically, we are living in an Ice Age right now and have been doing so since about three million years ago. It's called the Quaternary Glaciation. This Ice Age consists of vacillating glacial and interglacial periods. During a glacial period, temperatures plummet, glaciers expand across the northern hemisphere, and most of North America and Northern Europe (Ireland, too) gets buried under ice. An interglacial period happens when temperatures warm and the glaciers retreat back to the Arctic to await the next cycle. Lately, this cycle has been repeating every 100,000 years or so. Usually when people say "Ice Age," what they are actually referring to is a glacial period. The "Ice Age" in the popular imagination, full of Cro-Magnons and woolly mammoths and sabretooth tigers, almost always refers to the most-recent glacial period.

I've known about Beringia since I was a kid, but I'd never bothered to look at a speculative map of its boundaries until recently. Beringia is huge! I'd always envisioned a narrow isthmus, but it is actually a much broader expanse of land, kind of like Doggerland. Anthropologists debate whether those who crossed Beringia did so on foot or hugged the coast in canoes, but Michael's stance seems to be "¿Por qué no los dos?" I was prepared to ask them about this debate, but they addressed it without any prompt.

This information doesn't really change much about the origins of Native Americans other than pushing the timeline back a bit. It looks like the recent ~20,000 BCE crossing was the first time people crossed into North America and stayed here continuously. Early humans migrating into the "Atlantic-facing Americas" from Europe, the Mediterranean, and Northwest Africa prompted some raised eyebrows, however. These must have been part of the earlier waves of settlement that did not last. Kind of like the Norse settlements in North America - they were here for a bit, but eventually they either left or died out.

How could these proto-European/Mediterranean/African ancestor groups reach North America? Certainly not by sailing directly across the ocean. Even the Norse, who were uniquely well-suited for an ocean crossing because of the way their ships were designed, made their way to North America by island-hopping across Iceland and Greenland. Still, you'd have a devil of a time attempting that route in a canoe, so how could a transatlantic migration possibly work if you don't have longships?

What was supposedly southwest of Ireland, west of the Mediterranean, and northwest of NW Africa? Michael did not mention Atlantis, but I'm guessing the Atlantean landmasses, which supposedly existed as an archipelago, formed part of the journey. Those landmasses were then destroyed. But maybe there were other landmasses that went underwater for natural reasons. During a glacial period, all the frozen water forming those continent-wide glaciers is no longer in the ocean, which causes sea levels to plummet. The coastlines of western Europe also extend much further into the ocean during these periods of time. All I can do is speculate, but Michael's account suggests that it was possible to make it across the North Atlantic without ever having to lose sight of land. If any traces of these people exist, they are probably underwater somewhere off the East Coast in areas that were abovewater back then.

All of this was very interesting, but 120,000 BCE still felt a bit too recent for me. And as Michael continued, I started remembering bits of older sessions that I'd forgotten. Like Michael telling Geraldine that the networked coastal civilizations from a million years ago "could be said to have existed on nearly every known continent at this time" [link]. Or Michael telling Geraldine that "the greatest of the civilizations" that existed between 750,000 and 300,000 BCE were located in "The Eastern Coast of the United States" and "The Western Coast of South America" (among other locations) [link]. I spent a lot of this session scrambling through the TLE archives to find these excerpts, but I was not able to before the session ended. So, with time running short, I just asked about whether there were coastal chakra-cities in North America and figured I'd just cross-examine them in another conversation if they said no. But they didn't say no.

My intention for this session had been to explore the very first time humans ever lived in North America, but we had different ideas of what "human" meant. Michael seems to have interpreted "humans" as "Homo sapiens" (fair enough) but I meant the first incarnations undertaken in North America by Essences from our Design, which is something I would expect to have happened millions of years ago. That remains unknown and would be interesting to explore. I'm guessing it involves Caretakers plopping small groups of people throughout the Americas during the first or second interventions.