The First Virginians

About 460 million years ago land masses began to move, like floating plates they eventually collided with each other forming a super continent called Pangaea [pan-jee-uh]. Virginia was located thousands of miles from the ocean, deep within Pangaea. Eventually Pangaea began to break up drifting apart to form the Atlantic Ocean. For the next 400 million years animals evolved into dinosaurs and the first mammals.

About 60 million years ago a massive asteroid moving at 150,000 mph carved a 90-mile-wide crater into Earth at today’s Chicxulub, Yucatan, Mexico ending the age of dinosaurs killing 3 in 4 species, those weighing over 15 pounds. This marked the beginning of man’s eventual rise above all other living creatures.

Climate has always taught man how to survive, and one of the harshest was the Toba Volcanic Eruption on the island of Sumatra 70,000 years ago. It created a global volcanic winter for eight years in many parts of the world. When this catastrophe hit, one group of people who survived had adopted a strategy of spreading the risk of survival by forming larger groups outside just one immediate family. Around 50,000 years ago, this group of families combined their resources and left Africa, and over the next 15,000 years they populated the world, all except for north and south America.

As the grip of the ice-age loosened and temperatures became warmer, a small group moved east into Siberia. Continuing on until 35,000 years ago they encountered a fertile one-hundred-mile wide land mass between Asia and North America where woolly mammoth and grasslands were in abundance, a site today known as Beringia, the route credited for migration into America. There they were stopped by the Wisconsin Glaciation Ice Age causing a 15,000-year layover.

About 20,000 years ago the ice age in North America retreated to allow Beringans to skirt the Pacific Ocean shore-line and move on into North and South America.

Mayan cities in Central America /\
and Mississippian Culture \/.

Archeologists have found large well-advanced civilizations in Mayan cities in Central America with a peak population of nearly two-million, and in the Mississippi River Valley a group of cities, called Cahokia, was populated by more than twenty-thousand people.

One group arrived in Virginia 18,000 years ago. In the 1980’s remains of the Pre-Clovis Indian culture were discovered at a site on the Nottoway River in Sussex County called Cactus Hill.
In another discovery a few years later their advanced civilization was clearly revealed. Two miles west of Bluemont VA, concentric stone circles of rocks, weighing more than a ton, had been placed to mark solar events. It is the oldest man-made structures in North America still in existence with more features than Stonehenge and twice as old. At different times in the year the Pe-Clovis Indians visited here for ceremonial services.

From the hill country of Virginia, the Pre-Clovis Indians spread out with groups moving into the Atlantic coastal region living in peace for many thousands of years. They built villages from North Carolina to Nova Scotia. Called Eastern Woodland Indians, those along the Cape Henry coast became known as the Chesepian Indians, a name used for the Chesapeake Bay, “Great Shellfish Bay." By the end of the sixtenth century, Virginia had reached a total population of 50,000 Indians.

In 1561 the the Spanish were unsuccessful in etablishing a mission on a tributary of the James River. While the Spanish did little to disturb the peace, things started to unravel when for first time an Indian leader pitted tribe against tribe. The rise of Chief Powhatan's confederation created a large part of Virginia’s troubles.

In about 1570 young Powhatan (1547 – 1618) inherited the leadership of about 4-6 Algonquian tribes, and through diplomacy and force, he assembled a total of 30 tribes, about 13,000 Indians, into a Powhatan Confederacy, stretching from modern-day Alexandria to the James River. The Chesepians refused to be part of this confederation, and, as a result, the strongest tribe in Powhatan's confederation, the Nansemond, started whittling away at the Chesepians.

On the morning of April 26, 1607, the Jamestown Settlers arrived at Cape Henry, destined to be the first permanent English settlement in the new world. They found the local population healthier, better fed, and more secure with better sanitation than the English. For example, the Virginia Indians bathed once a day compare to the Colonists who bathed infrequently.

Up until the late 15th century, the population of Indians and Europeans in the Americas grew steadily with the Indian population reaching 100 million or more, a fifth of the world’s population at that time. After more and more Europeans started coming to the American continent, the Indian population began to plummet. Eurasian diseases such as influenza, pneumonic plagues, and smallpox, in combination with conflict, forced removal, enslavement, imprisonment, and outright warfare with European newcomers reduced populations and disrupted traditional societies. The causes of the decline and the extent of it have been characterized as a genocide by some scholars. From the 50,000 Indians in Virginia, by 1700 the population was reduced to less than 2,000.