Population

Before the appearance of the Europeans, America was populated by Indians, the Eskimos and the Aleuts. The Eskimos inhabited Greenland, northern regions of Canada and Alaska and the west and south-west coast of Alaska and the adjoining islands. The Aleuts populated the west of Alaska, the Aleut and the Shumagin Islands. 

It was Columbus who called the native population Indians, as he believed that he had discovered India. Naturally, the aborigines themselves did not call themselves Indians. Each tribe or people had their own name. At present, the aborigines of the New World prefer to be called indigenous Americans or the “first nations”. 

The origin of the native population remained a mystery for a long time. The acknowledged hypothesis is that the first people came to America from Asia and that the continent was settled from the north to the south. Archaeological discoveries prove to the fact that people came to the New World 14-15 thousand years ago and quickly inhabited all areas not covered with glaciers. In the last 50 years there has been a number of claims about discovering in America monuments that are 17, 20, 30 and even 200 thousand years old. These are mostly forgeries or products of misunderstanding. Some monuments that are 15-17 thousand years old may turn out to be original, but there are no facts proving this. 

Most likely, different groups of people from Asia penetrated into America. The native habitat of some of them was not far from the Pacific Ocean coast, some of them came from the depths of South and East Siberia. The inflow of new population from Asia lasted for several centuries. The last wave was formed be ancestors of the Eskimos and the Aleuts. 

By the time the Europeans arrived to North America, the population of the continent north of Mexico was approximately 1 million people. It is ten times less than the population of Mexico and Guatemala at that time. The low density of population was caused by the fact that some North-American Indians did not know agriculture at all, while others grew maize and other crops that came to the continent from the south and were not well adapted to the temperate climate. Since Indians did not have domestic animals, they were dependant on hunting, which also limited population growth. The population was most dense in the agricultural South-East and along the coast of the Pacific Ocean where rivers were rich with salmon. 

The ethnographic studies of the North American Indians began in the third quarter of the 19th – 20th century. By this time many native peoples, especially in the east of the continent and in California, were already extinct. 

Portrait of woman. Greenland. The Eskimo. Mid-to-late 19th cent.		Portrait of woman. The Aleutians. USA. Alaska, Unalaska. V.I. Iohelson. 1909		Portrait of man. USA, New-Mexico. The Pima. Late 19th cent.
Group portrait of the American Indians in traditional costumes, mid-to-late 19th c.		Anthropological photo: Apache woman with many tattoos on her face and body (front view). USA. The Apache, late 19th c.		A headman, late 19th c.
The Ute junior headman. The Ute, late 19th c.		The Pueblo woman. USA. New-Mexico. Pueblo Indians, late 19th c.		The Ute children. USA. The Ute, late 19th c.
The Pueblo woman. USA. New-Mexico. Pueblo Indians, late 19th c.		The Pima squaw. USA. New-Mexico. The Pima, late 19th c.		An aged Eskimo in European cloths. Greenland. Greenland Eskimos. Talbizer W., 1905
Aleutian  F.Prokopyev. USA. Alaska. The Aleutians, 1909