Why Were Early People Able To Use The Bering Land Bridge?

The Earliest Americans:
Directions: Write complete sentences to answer the following questions.
1. What was the Ice Age?
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
2. Why were early peoples able to use the Bering Land Bridge?
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
3. Circle the earliest known civilization in the Americas: Aztec, Inca, Maya, Olmec

Directions: Fill in the blank using the vocabulary words above.
4. _________________ are people believed to have crossed the Bering Land Bridge.
5. _________________ are people who obtain food by hunting animals and gathering plants.
6.

If these two groups have such different ways of living, then imagine how much Native Americans from different parts of the country might differ!

For thousands of years, the Chinook have lived near the coast of the Pacific Ocean. The Chinook were masterful canoe builders and were good at navigating on the water. They were known, and are still known, for being skilled fishers. The fish that they caught most often was the salmon. The salmon was a very important food source for the Chinook, and it plays a large role in the Chinook sense of identity.

Let’s compare the Chinook to a group of Native Americans on the opposite coast: the Penobscot people in Maine. The Penobscot also derived meaning from the animals they hunted, although the animals were different. The Penobscot hunted beavers, otters, moose, bears, and caribou. The Penobscot were also skilled canoe builders, but they used a different method than the Chinook. Penobscot canoes were made using birch bark instead of a hollowed tree