Authors’ first mistake is failing to let on that a controversy exists. Instead, they seem compelled to provide answers that students are supposed to “learn.” Most simply tell that during the last ice age, about 13,000 years ago, sea level was much lower, so people walked across a land bridge that is now the Bering Strait.

This hypothesis fits authors’ storyline of unrelenting progress. These original settlers didn’t have to invent anything, such as boats; they just walked. They weren’t explorers; they just “followed herds of animals.” Indeed, authors imply that they weren’t much more intelligent than the animals: “they did not know that they were exploring a new continent.” Ask a student to define “continent.” She will say “a large land mass.” Substitute that phrase for “continent” in the textbook’s sentence and invite comment. Surely no one could be so dense as to miss that they were in a large land mass! This inferred stupidity stems from the notion in our culture that long-age Natives were “primitives,” as the previous essay explains.

Little evidence supports this hypothesis. No fossil record shows humans in northwest Canada and Alaska along the narrow ice-free corridor that existed for a while during the ice age. Of course, teachers must point out that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so humans might have come that way. American Indians and people in northeast Siberia do share cultural and genetic similarities. But they may have come by boat. Homo erectus got to Lombok in Indonesia more than 500,000 years ago, and one can never walk to Lombok. So people have had boats for a long time. Of course, not being made of stone, no boats from the distant past have survived.