Since the first centuries of European colonization of the Americas and up until the 19th century, several European intellectuals and theologians tried to account for the presence of the aboriginal population by connecting it to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, who according to Biblical tradition, were deported following the conquest of the Israeli kingdom by the Neo-Assyrian Empire. In the past as well as in the present, these efforts were and still are being used to further the interests of religious groups, both Jewish and Christian, and they have also been used to justify European settlement of the Americas.