Early theories of the indiginous peoples of the Americas
Updated 25 April 2000

The European conception of world history at the time of Columbus' journey to the American continents and for hundreds of years afterwards -- for some, still today -- was derived from the Bible. Here we find the story of a single creation followed by a dispersal. A universal flood is said to have wiped out humanity with the exception of Noah and his family, which then resettled the earth. No mention is made in the Bible of the inhabitants of these vast continents lying west of Europe and east of Asia.

The presence of any peoples at all in the New World thus posed a challenge to this traditional conception of world history, and various ingenious attempts were made -- and are still being made today -- to square the facts with the theory. Increasing attention being paid to fossils as evidence of a distant past -- an antediluvian flora and fauna -- forms an integral part of this discussion. The following examples from England and the British colonies during the long eighteenth-century may serve as illustrations.

1. In The State of Virginia (1724), the Rev. Hugh Jones' speculates there once may have been a land bridge from Tartary to the American continent. He then moves on to Deluge Studies:

"What some may object in contradiction to the universality of the Deluge; that the communication between Asia and America was washed away by it; thence inferring that the Americans are of antidiluvian families, may (I presume) be exploded, when we remark, that in most places, at a great depth, and far distant from the sea, are many great beds of strange shells, and bones, and teeth of fish and beasts vastly different from any land or water-animals now found in those, or any other parts of the world; so that notwithstanding all the curious speculations of philosophers to reconcile this with reason, and ascribe for it natural causes; yet to me it appears evidently to be a token, and relict of the general flood of Noah. For these shells and bones might be easily preserved from corruption, and mouldering so long a time, whilst covered with a great thickness of dry earth, and kept from air; to which when they are exposed they soon decay." (50-51).

2. In one of his publications (details forthcoming), Daniel Defoe speculates that the native peoples of the New World are descendants from the Carthagenians.

3. The Noble Savage. In literature, an idealized concept of uncivilized man, who symbolizes the innate goodness of one not exposed to the corrupting influences of civilization. The glorification of the noble savage is a dominant theme in the Romantic writings of the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For example, Émile, ou, De l'education, 4 vol. (1762), is a long treatise on the corrupting influence of traditional education; the autobiographical Confessions (written 1765-70) reaffirms the basic tenet of man's innate goodness; and Dreams of a Solitary Walker (1776-78) contains descriptions of nature and man's natural response to it. The concept of the noble savage, however, can be traced to ancient Greece, where Homer, Pliny, and Xenophon idealized the Arcadians and other primitive groups, both real and imagined. Later Roman writers such as Horace, Virgil, and Ovid gave comparable treatment to the Scythians. From the 15th to the 19th centuries, the noble savage figured prominently in popular travel accounts and appeared occasionally in English plays such as John Dryden's Conquest of Granada (1672), in which the term noble savage was first used, and in Oroonoko (1696) by Thomas Southerne, based on Aphra Behn's novel about a dignified African prince enslaved in the British colony of Surinam. François-René de Chateaubriand sentimentalized the North American Indian in Atala (1801), René (1802), and Les Natchez (1826), as did James Fenimore Cooper in the Leatherstocking Tales (1823-41), which feature the noble chief Chingachgook and his son Uncas. The three harpooners of the ship Pequod in Melville's Moby Dick (1851), Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, are other examples. From Encyclopedia Brittannica

4. More accurately, José de Acosta, a Jesuit missionary to South America, suggested in 1589 that the original Americans had somehow migrated from Siberia many thousands of years ago.

Bibliography

Jones, Hugh (1724). The State of Virginia. Edited by Richard L. Morton. Chapel Hill: UNC Press for the Virginia Historical Society, 1956.

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