Man in America

"When the Europeans came to this continent at the end of the fifteenth century
they found it already inhabited by races of men very different from
themselves. These people, whom they took to calling 'Indians,' were spread
out, though very thinly, from one end of the continent to the other. Who were
these nations, and how was their presence to be accounted for? To the first
discoverers of America, or rather to the discoverers of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries (Columbus and his successors), the origin of the Indians
presented no difficulty. To them America was supposed to be simply an outlying
part of Eastern Asia, which had been known by repute and by tradition for
centuries past. Finding, therefore, the tropical islands of the Caribbean sea
with a climate and plants and animals such as they imagined those of Asia and
the Indian ocean to be, and inhabited by men of dusky colour and strange
speech, they naturally thought the place to be part of Asia, or the Indies.
The name 'Indians,' given to the aborigines of North America, records for us
this historical misunderstanding. But a new view became necessary after Balboa
had crossed the isthmus of Panama and looked out upon the endless waters of
the Pacific, and after Magellan and his Spanish comrades had sailed round the
foot of the continent, and then pressed on across the Pacific to the real
Indies. It was now clear that America was a different region from Asia." - The
Antiquity of Man in North America - The Descendants of Paleolithic Man in
American - Traces of a Pre-Indian People - Man in America ...