Some Native Americans must have gone back to Northeast Asia across Beringia. This doesn't fit the mental picture that we have of migration, of a big arrow on a map going from Old Place to New Place, but it is very much the way immigration usually works. Consider the many immigrant groups to the US: some puritans went back, some Cavaliers went back, many Germans went back, and I remember from as recently as 20 years ago that Greeks would come here, work for relatives and go back, and children would go back to live with grandparents for a year or so more than once in their childhood. Filipinos go to work everywhere: the US and Canada, Japan, China, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, sending money home. Sometimes they stay in the new place permanently, sometimes they go back and forth for two decades and then settle back in their home village again. The Angles and Saxons came to raid, then to be hired as troops to protect against other raiders, then to be petty warlords on the coast, then as permanent settlers, either bringing wives or finding them here. In between, then sent for nephews and sent daughters back to northern Europe and bounced back and forth for a couple of centuries.
Irish families, when you can get good records, had people move from the countryside to Dublin, or Manchester, or London, then to New York or Boston, then on to Chicago or the South, or the far West to work the railroads or the gold fields. They also went back to those previous places. Jews would move everywhere once they got here, but seldom went back to Eastern Europe. People who have moved once find it easier to move again. It was the same in prehistory.
It is important to remember that the people moving are not doing so with a map with a giant arrow in their heads, thinking "Over the next few centuries, we should be making it to the Pacific Northwest." They are making a decision for this lifetime, this year, this season, and things might look different quickly.
Update: In response to JMSmith's comment
5 comments:
Does it indicate a migration or a gradient?
OK, maybe that was ambiguous. Suppose that instead of large to-and-fro migration, there was shorter range to-and-fro all along the route. After a while genes from one end reach the other, but diluted--but almost nobody ever makes the full trek.
This almost certainly happened, and more frequently. If the Irishman goes back, it is likely to be back to Boston from a stint out west or to Dublin rather than the village. If the latter, it is likely to be for a temporary reason, like a dying mother, or at the end of his life.
In my 20's I had an interesting weekend after volunteering to drive a guest speaker from India to the city where his next events were to happen. I discovered that we had have several stops scheduled en-route for meals with various hosts he had agreed to meet while in the country (great food!). And at one of these I was a fly on the wall as he was interviewed about his nephew's suitability for an arranged marriage with one of the host's daughters.
The conversation was all in Malayalam, but I could follow enough to grok that both sides were acting with great love for the young people in question, and wanting them to be happy as well as successful. It struck me that their community spanned between the two continents in a rather organic way rather than the migrants being gone and cut off, or the old-world being left-behind.
Anyway, we're partly speaking of North-American pre-history here, but also about the modern world. In my own family lore the migration from abroad seems to have been one-and-done with no returns, but until the 1920's the "German" side only married others within the German-speaking Lutheran congregations in the US, and the Scottish side only married others within the Presbyterians. There's some back and forth between US states (from frontier to civilization and back) that's trackable in the genealogy, but overseas travel must have been right out.
American history generally underemphasizes the sojourners. Our national myth requires that every immigrant fell in love with life in the Land of Liberty. The truth is that many immigrants were alienated by American culture. Some went home when they discovered that streets were not paved with gold in the Land of Opportunity. Others were repelled by the atomized multicultural melange. Those who hung on softened the shock by clustering in their little Italys and Chinatowns.
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