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I can't parse what you're saying. Are you splitting hairs over the word "American"? Context matters, and the context is obvious here.
by mcbits 9y ago
I can't parse what you're saying. Are you splitting hairs over the word "American"? Context matters, and the context is obvious here.
- mc32 9y agoWell, you wouldn't say the first Italians (or the first Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, or the first Koreans) arrived from (some place) in xxxx BCE.
- tomjakubowski 9y ago"Americans" can also mean "people living in the Americas".
- mc32 9y agoTrue, but if you read the article it is referring to the first people to arrive south of the 49th parallel. People were already inhabiting what is now Canada. The context is they theoretically traveled along the littoral in boats vs some inland pathway on foot.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoIf you're going to get that picky about it, they would have arrived in Alaska first. Not Canada.
- tomjakubowski 9y agoI read the article, thanks. There is mention of Clovis culture in what is now the United States, but it clearly uses "Americans" in the broader sense. For example, here, where Monte Verde is a site in modern day Chile: Early Americans apparently knew how to take full advantage of its abundant resources. At Monte Verde, once 90 kilometers from the coast, archaeologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Nashville found nine species of edible and medicinal seaweed dated to about 14,000 years ago.
- mcbits 9y agoI probably would when talking about the first people in those specific places. Or the first Europeans in Europe, Africans in Africa, Asians in Asia, Americans in the Americas, etc. "American" also describes the citizens of that one state with the word "America" in the name, which sometimes leads to ambiguity, but not here.