When Columbus and his men -- animals came but no women -- reached the land in the Americas, both the people watching them arrive and the men on the ships were not sure whether they were looking at other human beings. Nine months later they knew they were at least the same species, because the definition of "species" (19th century definition) was that the mammals were fertile together -- they could have babies. Half and half, but not very different.
Some of the crew had been to Africa, so they knew that was possible. Though skin color varied a bit, the real difference was not physical but cultural. Later on, farther up the coast, two leaders -- one from each side -- tried an experiment. Each sent his son to live with the other kind of people -- one being Euro and the other being indigenous -- while growing up.
They weren't very sophisticated about culture, didn't know what was physically inherited and what was learned, so they assumed that the boys would acquire two cultures and be very powerful. As it turned out, they were mentally and emotionally like the people they grew up with, though they had no word for that, and didn't want to go back to their own people. Anyway, the white boy knew how to hunt, fish, and dance, but the indigenous boy could read and spend money. Each had skills useless for the people he was born to.
The tribes on the East Coast witnessed the dissension between French and English immigrants and the growing determination of the Euros who had come to America to run their own country. Unfortunately, this new country was so Euro it didn't consider the indigenous people. Nevertheless, tribal folks know how to take sides and they fought on several, depending on personal allegiances to friends and neighbors. This led to mixing.
The incessant fighting as well as climate and food disasters in Europe sent waves of desperate people to the new country. They had learned to be relentlessly focused on their own survival and pushed everything else out of their way. This wave of white people -- often with red hair -- were stigmatized by the Euros already present. The situation was parallel to today's various mass migrating movements but different in other ways. The Irish, for instance, were famous for drinking and brawling. Central American families are not.
Every time more penniless people arrived from the East, everyone already in place tried to push back the indigenous people to make more room. Some of the latter seemed to assimilate, esp. among the French, until the tribal people had been pushed into Oklahoma, designated Indian land, where the Cherokee and others tried to create towns with houses, newspapers and churches just like Euros. But pretty soon the new Americans took it back.
The third "card" had been Africans who were brought in as slaves and forced to develop the American resources: sugar and silver in the south, cotton and livestock in the north. They became themselves a resource without their permission.
The fourth "card" was Asian, also escaping from war and famine, workers before warriors, a human resource not quite enslaved. They built the railroads that finally cleared the prairies of Indians and Buffaloes, bringing in the homesteaders to carve up the land. Reservations for the remaining indigenous people began to be established for these prairie hunters and warriors about 1850.
It was beginning to be necessary to think about who they were, since they were impoverished once their sustenance was removed. As a political force, sentimental people back East would not allow them to be simply shot or starved for long, though some of that happened. Finally the reservations were supplemented with treaties and commodities, which were sometimes little more than pantomime.
In those days knowledge about human bodies was limited, but there was a fixation on blood, esp. after the Civil War, and much traditional thought about generations and inheritance, since that's how wealth was managed. The theory developed that a human was like a jar of blood and that it could be varied by inheritance. In fact, blood cells have no nuclei and so can NOT carry the physical inheritance of a person, which is in the nuclei's DNA. People didn't know that, so they talked in terms of dripping ink into milk and other metaphors of fluids.
They understood inheritance and that's how the idea developed that everyone who was there at first contact was a certain kind of tribal person but would change if they interbred with a different kind of person. Everything was based on "provenance" which is the line of descent from one person to the next, which was carefully recorded by the church and government among Euros but not among Tribals, who sent kids with whatever parents needed them and could take care of them.
If a provenance were between, say, a tribal woman and a white man, then the child was assumed to be half-and-half, like mixing two fluids. But DNA does NOT work like that. It is like a coiled zipper that comes apart and then zips up with the other person's half to create someone new. The child is not like either parent, but carries the embodiment of the two merged. No one knew this at the time, so a great deal of effort was devoted to making long lists of who was entitled to commodities or allotments. These were the original first generation whose descendants would be qualified, in spite of the lists including a few French trappers and even a Polynesian ship crew member or two.
This policy of making provenance inheritance become the practicality of "blood" was very faulty, but blood is romantic and to help with the idea, raw fractions were called "quantum," which sounded more scientific. As DNA studies grew more sophisticated, they pretended to be the same thing, but they were not.
Now that modern research can inspect the DNA of hominins from millennia ago, we find even more surprising revelations. Maybe hundreds of kinds of hominins, rough drafts of humans (maybe we ourselves are rough drafts!) and some were close enough to being the same species to leave DNA traces of half/half children. Many Euros have Neanderthal DNA in them. Most Asians have instead DNA from the Naledi. The Original Americans, the indigenous, have Naledi DNA but not Neanderthal.
If an indigenous person has DNA that shows Naledi formulas -- dexterity, self-control, patience -- then they have probably inherited from the original indigenous people or from Asia. Euros with a bit of Neanderthal blood might be more belligerent, red-headed, and intent on dominating. But these are just guesses, a difference, say, like that between a MAC operating system and a Microsoft operating system. They do the same thing, but there are many small differences.
I'm tempted to say that Obama had Naledi DNA and Trump has Neanderthal DNA. But we have a lot more to figure out.
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