In 1590, the Spanish missionary Fray Jose de Acosta produced the first written record to suggest a land bridge connecting Asia to North America.
The theory of a land bridge has fueled the imagination of explorers and scientists for centuries. However, by the early 1800s scientists and theorists began discussing the possibility of a land bridge that had spanned between Asia and North America thousands of years ago. Yet another idea proposed that the inhabitants had generated out of mud. Another theory proposed the island of Atlantis as the origins of human life in the New World. One theory suggested the migration of Norsemen across Greenland into North America.
As early as the 1500s, early settlers and European thinkers were interested in discovering how humans had come to populate North and South America. The continent of North America has been inhabited by humans for at least 16,500 years.
