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In my opinion, and it is only opinion, it is likely that the people we call Indians are a mix of many backgrounds. I am not saying that the Indians did not build the sites, and anyone who reads my articles would know that. I always make a point of asserting the indigenous origins of the sites.
What I am saying here is that the Indians are not an unmixed population all of whose ancestors came over the Bering land bridge--that European, Polynesian and perhaps African blood, the last especially in South America--may have mingled in the New World. Kennewick man, for example, may be among the ancestors of some native people. This does not make them not Indian--it redefines what we mean by Indian.
It is a fact that early written descriptions of people met by Europeans on the east coast of North America differ from descriptions of people met further inland. It would not surprise me to learn that northern people around the world share some genetics, as it seems there are common factors to be found in northern cultures. I'm not saying that ships only came one way. People from the Americas could have visited or ended up on other continents, too.
The peoples found in North America before Columbus were varied in race, culture and language. This was not one people. Some academics have said that some languages in North America were as different from one another as English is different from Chinese (not that any were like English or Chinese. They were not.) Remember, too, that European people, in the time frame I'm talking about were living the same kind of life as those on this side of the Atlantic. They were no more advanced in any way. I balk as much as anyone when accomplishments of Indians are attributed to imaginary visits by supposedly 'more advanced' cultures.
I think the limiting of our ideas about where the first American people came from serves to keep our ideas of them monolithic, distant, exotic and 'not like us.' These were regular people like us, not savages, not nobler, their biggest difference perhaps being that they did not have a religion that described the world as profane. Christianity's big contribution to Western Society was stripping the natural world of its sacred status, thereby allowing it to be ravaged for personal gain and making Western 'culture' possible. But again, this is just my opinion . . .
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road