A scientist from Northwest Georgia with both Jewish and Cherokee heritage uses advanced DNA analysis to explore the past.
Much of what Cherokees now tell people about their heritage before 1700 is mythology made up by Caucasian North Carolina academicians in the late 1970s and 1980s. It totally conflicts with the archaeological records, eyewitness accounts and maps from the 1500s and 1600s. When I was a land use planning consultant for the Eastern Band of Cherokees in 1976, they still relied on “The History of the Cherokee People”- written in 1826 by the great Principal Chief Charles Hicks. Most of what Hicks wrote can be backed up 100% by maps and eyewitness accounts.
Hicks stated that the Cherokees formerly consisted of three bands, who wandered about southern Quebec and the Great Lakes Region until the mid-1600s. They were driven south by the Iroquois into the West Virginia Mountains then around the time, Charleston, SC was settled, they arrived in northeastern Tennessee.
After the horrific 1696 Smallpox Epidemic had wiped out many of the “mound builders” in western North Carolina, they entered the North Carolina Mountains . . . killing or driving off the remaining “mound builders” . . . then after burning their temples, erecting Cherokee “town houses” (communal buildings) on the mounds. He specifically states several times that the Cherokees never lived in Georgia until after the American Revolution.
Colonial archives only tells us with reliability what happened in Colonial times. It is possible to go much farther back with DNA analysis.
The Americas Revealed 