A Brief History of The Caribbean:
The Taino people
Hello everyone, I decided to start a blog post series called a Brief History of The Caribbean. This idea was birthed from the inspiration of one of my colleagues and also the fact that I have been learning Caribbean history since I could form a sentence. Each country that makes up what has considered the Caribbean nation has a beautifully diverse population, culture, and history. I hope to provide some form of explanation to many of the historical aspects of these nations' origins, to the best of my ability.
Before we can answer questions such as Why some people in southern America consider themselves Caribbean; we must analyze the people that existed in these lands before the European invasion. These people were called the Taino. I can see the visual question marks forming in your brain right now. Who were they? How did they get here? What were they like? What happened to them? Well, all of that and more will be answered within this series. Today, we will be focusing on how the Taino people got to the Americas and why they traveled here from their native homelands.
The Taino people were apart of a larger group called the Amerindians. The Amerindians consisted of all the indigenous people that resided throughout the central, northern, and southern parts of the ‘Americas’. In an idyllic world, we would have the ability to trace back the origins of these people. Due to the lack of technology and many of the orators of their history dying due to the European produced genocide. What is known comes from those that remained and genetic mapping.
It is believed that these people originated from central Asia, specifically southern Siberia thousands of years ago. Due to climate change, it is believed that these Homo Sapiens were losing their food resources quite quickly. This was the first-ever ‘I made a long trip because I was craving something specific’.
The Amerindians then crossed the ice-covered body of water that separated Russia and the Americas. This body of water was known as the Bering Strait. Some stayed but eventually, the Amerindians kept moving south until most of the Northern and Southern Americas and the West Indies were inhabited. Some notable groups that were descendants of the original settlers are the Aztecs, Incas, and the indigenous people that existed in America
The map below indicates said human migration.
Next week we will focus specifically on the Taino people. I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition of a Brief History. I hope that you don’t have to travel thousands of kilometers to get food.
Sources:: MLA
Schurr, Theodore G. “The peopling of the New World: perspectives from molecular anthropology.” Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 33 (2004): 551–583.
Arnaiz-Villena, Antonio, et al. “The origin of Amerindians and the peopling of the Americas according to HLA genes: admixture with Asian and Pacific people.” Current Genomics 11.2 (2010): 103–114.
