So I read Cutter's post before it got sent to the oubliette of the ether. Although he worded it very poorly (because, you know, Cutter), he's not entirely wrong.

Let me start out by saying that I am not addressing the political or cultural aspects, merely the scientific one.

From an anthropological point of view, the "indigenous" people of today aren't. Not by a long shot. At best they would be considered third wave immigrants but it is more likely they're fourth or even fifth wave immigrants. Put down your pitchforks and torches. There's facts to back this up.

First and foremost, back in 2017, a discovery was made in San Diego that showed human activity that dates back 24,000 years ago. That puts it well before the evidence we have of current "natives" settling in North America. Now, it could be argued that the settlers then were hominids and part of the Homo branch but not Homo Sapiens so they may not have been directly related to us. OK, that's fair.

But then we get to a very well known group of direct Paleolithic ancestors discovered in Monte Verde in Chile which has been dated back to ~14,500 years ago. In fact, there's enough evidence that it spawned four different sites. Two at Monte Verde and two at Chinchihuapi. You can read more about them here if you are so inclined. Of note is that these people were in South America and they didn't get there by boat, train, plane, or alien spaceship so it is highly likely they migrated via the Bering land bridge. Which means they migrated through North and Central America first. That's going to take a couple of thousand years on the shortest timeline because people tend to settle down where there's good water, plentiful game, and a tolerable climate. It's usually population pressure that causes people to migrate from settled places, pushing the boundaries of their culture every further outward.

Next we get to the Western Stemmed people who were definitely in North America, particularly the western parts, ~13,000 years ago. This is, relatively speaking in anthropological and archaeological terms, new data. You can find out more about them here.

Contemporaneously to the Western Stemmed people, we get to one of the most well known groups in North America. The Clovis People. They are definitively known to have also existed in North America ~13,000 years ago and their territory ranges from the Plains to the southeast of the current United States.

So that right there is four waves of human immigration in to North, Central, and South Americas many thousands of years before the allegedly "native" people of today claim being "first". Data and evidence proves they weren't. Not by many thousands of years.

The Paleolithic era of humanity is something that really interests me so I've read a ton about it. It's why Far Cry Primal is my favorite in the series. It's also why I am not popular with people who want to push for the rights of "indigenous" people because the data I can bring to the table shows that they are not, and never have been, indigenous. Were they in the Americas and settled before Europeans and Vikings showed up? Absolutely. But they're just migrants, like the Europeans after them. Were they conquered and dominated by the technologically superior Europeans? Absolutely. But, and here's where people need to put their emotions away, that's true of all of human history. We've always killed, displaced, and conquered one another for land, resources, or simply because we can. We're a predatory species and the thing we love doing more than anything else is predation. We still do it to this day. We just turned it in to sports, commerce, and politics.

If you can find some living specimen of Homo heidelbergensis or a similar species still living in Africa, you could rightfully call them indigenous.

But outside of that? We're all migrants. We migrate constantly. We move from place to place in search of better resources (jobs), land (bigger homes), or because we want to subsume ourselves in a different culture (relocating to a country other than that of your birth). There's no shame or difficulty in that concept and it's high time we accepted that we're all in the same pot instead of stupidly and pointlessly dividing ourselves due to something as ridiculous as a phenotype.