Essay On Cultural Diversity In The Caribbean

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Introduction: The Demographic Diversity of the Caribbean at the region’s earliest Times would start with the Caribbean populations dating back about 7,000 years, historians believe that those 7,000 years saw a changing of varied cultures and different kinds of human interactions, which mostly took place before the arrival of Columbus and Western history, Historians have estimated that the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the West Indies numbered approximately six million in 1492. As far as the pre-Columbian background in terms of demography and indigenous cultures it would include mainly three indigenous groups of inhabitants, they were the Ciboney (Guanahuatebey) or stone people, the Taino (Arawak), a rain forest agricultural people and, the sea-fearing Kalinago (Caribs) of the reefs and forest wetlands. There were at least four different "waves" of Native peoples who came to the Caribbean, all of whom eventually merged to become the Tainos (Arawak) and the Kalinago (Caribs), the cultural distinctions among the three groups are not great; the single greatest differentiating factor appears to be their respective dates of arrival in the region. The Ciboney seem to have arrived first and were found in parts of Cuba and the Bahamas. They also seem to have had the…show more content…
Later groups arrived from northern South America, primarily from the Orinoco and Amazon River valleys and the Caribbean coast of today's Venezuela, canoeing northwestward from Trinidad and Tobago, up the chain of islands to Puerto Rico and

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