Who were the first Californians? Legends, Myths, and how they relate to real history

In this thread I wish to discuss, who were the first Californians, and how does that relate to the populating of north America.
My focus will be on the legends and myths of the native peoples of central California, mainly the Miwok, the
Yokut and the Mono.
Unlike the stories of many other native Americans, many of these stories were collected before there was a chance of cultural contamination by outside sources,such as Christian missionaries.

I have chosen this subject because I live in central cal and have been to many of the places referenced in the stories, and I might also be part Mono.

First a little about the tribes in question, the Yokut,Miwok,and Mono.
The Yokut and Miwok are linguisticaly related tribes, and are among a group of tribes that populated the western US, the penutian language family.
en.m.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by punkinworks10


Howdy Punkinwork

I must ask, if you said this:

Unlike the stories of many other native Americans, many of these stories were collected before there was a chance of cultural contamination by outside sources,such as Christian missionaries

If a foreigner wrote down the stories that means there was cultural contact as a common language was used - that takes some time come about, during which there is contact. However I'm sure you'll be how the stories came to be recorded and by whom

reply to post by Hanslune


I have no idea what you just said right now.



OP, great thread. I take interest in this as well, being from the 559/209.

What kind of myths have you heard?

reply to post by UnaChispa


I think he's saying the stories he repeats are now contaminated. Assuming he's an 'outsider'.

Originally posted by UnaChispa
reply to post by Hanslune

 

I have no idea what you just said right now.



OP, great thread. I take interest in this as well, being from the 559/209.

What kind of myths have you heard?

Thanks I rewrote it to make it a bit clearer.......if someone is there to write down the stories - there will be cultural contamination. But lets not derail what OP has to say

So far the evidence is that the first Californians were the Clovis people and not related to modern native Americans.

This was the Arlington Springs Woman and is 13,000 ago.
www.cabrillo.edu...
archaeology.about.com...

reply to post by punkinworks10

Lived on the West Coast of California my whole life. Have hiked Santa Cruz range and seen sites, found arrow heads. Studied some about the coastal tribes. The coastal peoples that migrated up and down the Pacific Rim did not leave a lot of evidence behind of their culture. Artifacts are scarce. They travelled by canoe living off the abundance of ocean marine life as they moved from place to place. Because they travelled lightly and struck camp often, there are not a lot of dwellings, or artifacts leftover from more permanent sites like say "Pueblo" peoples further inland.

I found a site that shows some photos of people that lived this way further north so ATS'ers can get a flavor for a bygone era.

First People

Originally posted by Hanslune
reply to post by punkinworks10

 

Howdy Punkinwork

I must ask, if you said this:

Unlike the stories of many other native Americans, many of these stories were collected before there was a chance of cultural contamination by outside sources,such as Christian missionaries

If a foreigner wrote down the stories that means there was cultural contact as a common language was used - that takes some time come about, during which there is contact. However I'm sure you'll be how the stories came to be recorded and by whom

edit on 2/2/12 by Hanslune because: (no reason given)

Hi Hans
The stories I will reference were compiled in the late 19th, by anthropologists and other pioneering researchers.
Contact with Europeans came fairly late for the native Californians of the western slope of the central Sierra, in some cases it wasn't until the 1850's. And even after contact attitudes towards the native Californians kept them marginalized,and in cases treated like vermin and hunted for a bounty.
Consequently tribal stories weren't shared with outsiders and were kept by people who learned the stories pre contact. That is significant in that they knew the stories before the knew about white people's stories.
This a very good source for native California stories
www.sacred-texts.com...
Please explore them everyone
Oh, and links to the wiki pages on the Yokut, Miwok, and Mono.

en.m.wikipedia.org...

en.m.wikipedia.org...

en.m.wikipedia.org...


Please excuse the pace of my replies as I'm doing it at what ever time I have.

Probably another good source would be the stories told by Ishi, Ishi being a story in himself

Ishi the last 'wild' Indian

Previous thread on Ishi

Earlier thread on Ishi

reply to post by Hanslune


Yes, the story of ishi was required reading in 6th grade, fascinating and heart breaking at the same .

The penutian group of languages are spread along the west coast of the us and into the basin and ranges area,


I won't get into the nuts and bolts of the linguistics involved, but one of the common facets of the penutian languages us that they are found in association with river systems that drain into the pacific. These people followed the salmon.
It has been hypothosized that ultimately they are descended from the peoples of the eurasian arctic.

Based on archeological calculations, the Yok-Utian family may be as old as Indo-European, and the Klamath appear to have lived in their current location for 7000 years. Thus the time depth of the proposed Inland Penutian branch alone approaches the limits of what many think traditional historical reconstruction can determine; this is sometimes used as an argument against the Penutian

hypothesis. [citation needed]

Based on linguistic analysis, archaeological data, other historic evidence, and field trips, Otto J. von Sadovszky. late professor of Anthropology, California State University, Fullerton, made the correlation for the migration of fishers from the Ob River (Siberia). Their folklore suggests they ultimately followed salmon along the North American coast and entered San Francisco Bay. He dubbed them Cal-Ugrians, and the Asian group Ob-Ugrians. His reconstruction of such migrations has not beenwell received.In his studies, he suggests a link between certain Asian language families that include Hungarian (his native tongue) and languages of the Ob River and the Penutian languages of California. See his book for

a detailed analysis of the languages and the ethnohistorial reconstruction. [15][16][dubious – discuss]

en.m.wikipedia.org...
The wiki on the penutian group
This is significant in that it shores up the genetic evidence of where these people came from, and it helps an swer the question of the origin of the x haplotype that shows up in north America and in northern Europe. Both groups have common ancestors in siberia.

reply to post by punkinworks10


I don't see how you can avoid cultural contamination when dealing with native American myths. There would be "contamination" from other tribes and I do not believe that Miwok,Yokut or the Mono had any type of written language. While that does not mean contamination it does give way to degradation and alteration.

reply to post by JoshF


By cultural contamination, I'm more or less talking about not being filtered through several generations of English speaking story tellers and the like. And for most part the most part the tribes of central cal ( yokuts/miwok) share a linguistic heritage, and the mono are distantly related lingistic family
You can tell that some od the stories predate the split in the language, because tribes who speak a different language tell essentially the same stories .

The first californian was the guy who put the name "California" to the region, or the first to stay there, it doesn't make sense to link a "modern identify" to ancient people that had a different one.

Is like when in my country people talks about the indians (yes, indians, we don't called natives or natives-american or any political correct term) before the conquest and naming of the land as the first "warriors for the independence of INSERT-NAME-COUNTRY", it doesn't make sense because they didn't create the country, they didn't were part of it, they simple didn't give a sh... about it and they were not fighting for any independece of given country, only for their tribal lands.

So yes,, the first californian were the ones who put the name to the region and stay there.

California was discovered by Chinese in time of EARLY Mayans, their ship broke, they walked south to find people in present day mexico. I'm sure the net has info on this. Mayans temples found all over S.America using nasa satellite showing a slight yellow in trees that grew around the temples!! it was from limestone content.

It's hard to say where the native americans came from, but they were all red skinned. I am part of this.

I know Neandarthal man /men are not our ancestors, dna tests recently proved this. It's just a matter of wondering now, how many aliens were involved in making us. Just Adam an Eve? Moses? but others maybe? aside from the pigmees, we don't care about them. Those are ugly aliens who left behind some weird people only found in high mountains of India I think it was to this day.

Originally posted by ANNED
So far the evidence is that the first Californians were the Clovis people and not related to modern native Americans.

This was the Arlington Springs Woman and is 13,000 ago.
www.cabrillo.edu...
archaeology.about.com...

Ahh, yes the first Californians were the people who came down the coast, following the kelp highway. And yes the earliest accepted dates are for those sites in the channel islands.

Evidence for a diversified sea-based economy among North American inhabitants dating from 12,200 to 11,400 years ago is emerging from three sites on California's Channel Islands.

Reporting in the March 4 issue of Science, a 15-member team led by University of Oregon and Smithsonian Institution scholars describes the discovery of scores of stemmed projectile points and crescents dating to that time period. The artifacts are associated with the remains of shellfish, seals, geese, cormorants and fish.

The technologies involved suggest that these early islanders were not members of the land-based Clovis culture, Erlandson said. No fluted points have been found on the islands. Instead, the points and crescents are similar to artifacts found in the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau areas, including pre-Clovis levels at Paisley Caves in eastern Oregon that are being studied by another UO archaeologist, Dennis Jenkins. Last year, Charlotte Beck and Tom Jones, archaeologists at New York's Hamilton College who study sites in the Great Basin, argued that stemmed and Clovis point technologies were separate, with the stemmed points originating from Pacific Coast populations and not, as conventional wisdom holds, from the Clovis people who moved westward from the Great Plains. Erlandson and colleagues noted that the Channel Island points are also broadly similar to stemmed points found early sites around the Pacific Rim, from Japan to South America

The source article.
www.sciencedaily.com...

Without a doubt the first people into cali came by boat.
The thing to pin down is when and how many waves of settlement were there.

The people of the channel islands were also not typical northeast asians, but physically were more like pacific islanders, or melanesians.
And the link to the peoples of the basin and ranges, and Colombia plateau further re-enforces,
the idea that some of these people were following the salmon and the salmon led them inland.

Always good to discuss California, my home state. It is interesting that unlike the east coast, whos origins are much more clear cut, we don't know very much about the majority California's native history. My sister always points out the logic that many Californians have an issue with all the "illegal mexicans" without realizing the fact that California was part of the Aztec empire and it belonged to Mexico. So for most of history, we would have been the illegals.

Originally posted by punkinworks10

The people of the channel islands were also not typical northeast asians, but physically were more like pacific islanders, or melanesians.

Punkinworks this statement seems to be contradicted by the information from the sources

Erlandson and colleagues noted that the Channel Island points are also broadly similar to stemmed points found early sites around the Pacific Rim, from Japan to South America

reply to post by Hanslune


Hey Hans,
The article doesn't contradict my assertion, it merely states that there was a cultural similarity among the people of the pacific rim at the time.
I'm desperately trying to find the paper I was reading when I posted that last post, as it was an analysis of skeletal morphologies of remains found in Brazil at santa lago.
Ahh haa found the main paper referenced in the article that i was reading .

Abstract Comparative morphological studies of the earliest human skeletons of the New World have shown that, whereas late prehistoric, recent, and present Native Americans tend to exhibit a cranial morphology similar to late and modern Northern Asians (short and wide neurocrania; high, orthognatic and broad faces; and relatively high and narrow orbits and noses), the earliest South Americans tend to be more similar to present Australians, Melanesians, and Sub-Saharan Africans (narrow and long neurocrania; prognatic, low faces; and relatively low and broad orbits and noses). However, most of the previous studies of early American human remains were based on small cranial samples. Herein we compare the largest sample of early American skulls ever studied (81 skulls of the Lagoa Santa region) with worldwide data sets representing global morphological variation in humans, through three different multivariate analyses. The results obtained from all multivariate analyses confirm a close morphological affinity between South-American Paleoindians and extant Australo-Melanesians groups, supporting the hypothesis that two distinct biological populations could have colonized the New World in the Pleistocene/Holocene transition.

Link to paper
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

The other article states that the remains from santa rosa is. also fit into this general physical framework.
still looking for it.
So what I think is that the changing skeletal types of the earliest Americans in general, reflects the different waves of peoples moving out of southeast asia and populating the pacific rim as they went.
My question with this thread is, how and where do the native Californians fit onto those narrative.

reply to post by punkinworks10


Yes multiple waves each from what appears to be slightly different areas of Asia, However this may be an artifact of a limited data set. Give it a half century and a few hundred more skeletal recoveries and we should have a clearer picture!