[perrygeo]

Myths are not meant to be believed literally, they tell a story about how to live in right relationship to the earth. And that's why I find the first nation stories so valuable - it's a philosophy born of a very different historical trajectory than European culture.

The Beringian Standstill hypothesis states that a group migrated out of Asia 25k years ago and were effectively trapped by glaciers in the temperate coastal plains of southern Alaska (what is now the Gulf of Alaska). When glaciers melted 15kya, sea levels rose and they start traveling south.

(You'll notice lots of references to a great flood - the globally rising sea levels no doubt leading to this myth being prevalent around the world in many cultures, first nations included)

By that point, they'd already been Americans for 10k years. There wasn't likely any conscious realization of this, no cultural memory of "Asia". But they truly were the first Americans, and way earlier than we were taught.

The result is a grand natural experiment - a group of humans completely cut off from Asia/Africa/Europe for millennia. That culture incubated in southern AK for 10k years, then spread out over the Americas for the last 15k, only to run into long lost European cousins 500 years ago. It's that long period of relative isolation that makes the first nation stories so valuable. The kind of morals, myths and values that arose from this unique historical trajectory can be quite different to philosophies of the old continents. Yet surprisingly similar (we are human after all).

[johnea]

The article was about where the first americans came from.

What does a navajo creation myth have to do with that?

[perrygeo]

A creation myth is literally a story about where people come from, the connection seems fairly obvious.