Who were the first Americans?

When Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1942, he thought that the Earth was much smaller than it actually is. As a result, he believed that he had reached India and that the people in the Caribbean islands were Indians. In fact, the ancestors of these people came from north-eastern Asia, perhaps 40,000 years ago. They spread southwards and reached the southern tip of South America over 8,000 years ago. Today many scholars call the first Americans Amerindians to distinguish them from ‘Indian’ Indians.