A quick search on google with the key words "cherokee" and "10,000 years" produced 430,000 results
Evidence-------> http://www.ncmarkers.com/Markers.aspx?ct=ddl&sp=search&k=Markers&sv=Q-13%20-%20CHEROKEE%20INDIAN%20RESERVATION
The ancestors of the Cherokee sparsely occupied an area of 140,000 square miles across the southeastern United States. With a culture dating back 10,000 years, the Cherokee had developed linguistics shortly before the first millennium of the Common Era.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0713/p11s01-trgn.html
'Indigenous Amerindian genetic studies indicate that the "colonizing founders" of the Americas emerged from a single-source ancestral population that evolved in isolation, likely in "Beringia", (the posited land/ice bridge connecting Siberia with Alaska; which means these people migrated from Siberia). Age estimates based on Y-chromosome micro-satellite place diversity of the American Haplogroup Q1a3a (Y-DNA) at around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, (this would be the "Clovis" migrations - there were at least three such distinct migrations traced back along that 5,000 year interval and perhaps earlier still). These migrations would account from tribes spreading out from the Pacific Northwest following game and a slowly improving climate as the wandered southeast.' -- excerpted from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_AmericasThe Cherokee, (and other "first nations", which weren't actually "first" as distinct cultures), derived from such secondary, tertiary and so on migrations from the PNW area. Indeed, if one goes back 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, nearly all extant, (and now extinct), tribes developed from the Clovis migration, (so, they're either Siberians or, came from elsewhere to Siberia even earlier than 15,000 years ago). Based upon the distribution of Amerind languages and language families, a movement of tribes along the Rocky Mountain foothills and eastward across the Great Plains to the Atlantic seaboard is assumed to have occurred at least some 13,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Cherokee, N.C., is a window into another time and culture. It offers an opportunity to see the world through the eyes of this tribe, which can trace its presence back to 10,000 BC. Small groups camping in the Southern Appalachians left behind stone tools and artifacts that have been dated from that period.
http://allthingscherokee.com/travel_kituwah_mound.html
- Kituhwa, which is often referred to as the "mother town of the Cherokee." Archaeologists date the site back to nearly 10,000 years ago.
http://www.ajc.com/news/cherokee/trove-of-artifacts-in-1372024.html
officials hope to exhibit the findings — ranging from 10,000-year-old spear tips to a rifle used by the Cherokees — at The Funk Heritage Center at Reinhardt University.
Interesting; I'll have a look at those and examine any supporting evidence. Thanks, 'walks'. I did look into those links and a bit deeper as well. I found that, while such evidence of the existence and migration patterns, (such as of the "Clovis" migrations), indicates that nomadic tribes probably did derive from these migrations from Siberia/"Beringia", none of that evidence definitively provides that any of those tribes were distinctly and culturally "Cherokee". As mentioned, there's a strong case for such early tribes as the Iroquois, Cherokee, Choctaw, Apache and others
deriving from the Clovis migrations however, the assumption that the same evidence for that supposition supports a jump to the conclusion that it is specifically evidence of the Cherokee being a 10,000 year old distinct culture is unwarranted.
The same thing happened with the Kenniwick Man controversy in that an
assumption was made that, since the Kenniwick remains were 9,000 or so years old, that they
must be "native american", (when in fact, they were from the Siberian/Beringa migratory people of the Clovis era and not distinctly ancestrial to any specific tribe now extant).