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Not excluding my own name, I’ve grown increasingly suspicious of words ending in y.

Safety, diversity, community, affordability, accountability, equity, responsibility and a good many more terms are used and asserted as if (here’s the funny part) either the user or audience had a firm meaning.

Sorry to disappoint, but case after case and time on time a positive-sounding term has not a lick of solidity. You, as well as I, can find plenty of examples where flower-scented words and worthily noble aspiration led to nothing but spent air. Wonderful to be inspired by optimism, but wiser to add at least a hint of critical delay.

Tempting as it is to look at current political and governmental events regarding “y,” I say let’s look farther afield and further away in time.

You’ve heard (how could you not) the peopling of the New World beginning 15 to 10 thousand years past with the land bridge from Asia.

Consider, however, how fluffy and conjectural that notion is. Imagine the Siberian portion of Asia being so full of people that population expansion was necessary. Think, if you were doing well in Siberia, then why migrate? And, how many “surplus” folk had to be in Siberia to form a large enough population to succeed?

Let that simmer while I say the land-bridge account as usually given is holier than a saint’s sieve. Being uncritical, a person has to assume that the Asian community got together all those millennia ago to decide on migration. Where? They didn’t know. Seeds might cast their futures with where the wind blows.

People no. If you’re a native perfectly adapted to northern life do you up and decide on Niagara New York, which you don’t know exists? You don’t yet know about warm weather in Florida or herds on the Great Plains. Being excellent using kayaks to spear whales isn’t of much use dealing on foot with bison.

My main point here is to question the premises involved. To populate two entire continents in around 10 thousand years requires, seems to me, monumental levels of procreation. These people would need to be so busy reproducing I’d have to wonder they found the time to hunt, eat, build a canoe or relocate.

Very, almost amazingly, quickly populations grew large enough to fan out over starkly different environments from arctic, to tundra, to forest and dry plains. It’s not like a visit to arid Arizona, then see the Okefenokee and go away with any degree of mastery over either.

Or imagine, on your own and with limited tools and materials standing on one shore of the Mississippi and getting across. There are so many challenges and difficulties I’d be more inclined to make a joke out of the Land-Bridge story than trust it as anything more than a whack job nutty notion.

“I call to order the meeting of the Siberian Asian Community for Progress to decide upon the plan for a unified diverse dispersal of all who wish is to migrate according to equitable means of fairness to get to sunny California and balmy Florida to enjoy the climate before pushing on over the Isthmus and Andes, which we’ll find when we get  there. All in favor.”

Like the Oklahoma Land Rush, they’d have to line up ready to run, moving like bats out of hell to get all the way to the South American limit to live in what appears to have been extreme poverty and difficulty of existence.

You likely realize why I’ll not go into all the reasons or details I’d call on to question the glacier-era migration story. Here are a few snips. How large were the migrating groups? If clumps of a few families at a time they’d be limited and grow slowly. Large groups would be harder to feed and supply in strange territories. What occurs when new arrivals meet earlier settlers? If you’re going to succeed in new territory you need resources.

In a place new to you, where’s the source of stone for tools? If you go by large canoe down the coast how do you switch to living inland? How does successful seaside living prepare you for hunting elk?

The difficulty and complexity of moving any population into new territory is far more involved than saying “they migrated.” I doubt anyone can explain it, nor some of the other oddities such as language families or a far north language group ending up in the US Southwest.

Hopefully (this is where I’m going) some awareness that the widely accepted and “scientifically” upheld stance on post-glacial migration into the new world will give readers some juicy fodder to work with.

If nothing else, awareness that peopling two entire continents didn’t simply happen and was a huge and difficult achievement should add some depth and color to one of those continents, ours.

If you some thousands (a measurement you’d not have had) back arrived at today’s Tofte, MN (held by some as a center of the universe) would you know what you were seeing, how large it was, how far it went and what to do? How many generations of migration would it take to erase the distinction between salt and fresh water?

To those about to complain that I’m saying earlier people were ignorant. No. Unfamiliarity with certain things is ignorance, but the people unfamiliar are not more ignorant than I am of muons or flamingo breeding. Not leaping to conclusions  or clinging to past notions will maybe free us up. A bit.

Questioning the far past is a step. Believing no humans inhabited pre-glacial America is a problem because migrants had to be breeding populations. Hmmm. Quite often (evidenced frequently and practiced by the last Prophet) a group of fighting males kills off resident males and uses captive females to expand. Really, this works, a proven winner remaining in use.

Any case, whoever, whenever, did New World migrants struggle over stone tool affordability or a pressing need for day care? I joke. Instead consider migrating through months of freezing winter dark and brutal short summer.