Special Review American History - The First Settlers
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The Earliest Known Settlers Of The North American Continent
The First Americans
At the height of the Ice Age, in the middle of 34,000 and 30,000 B.C., much of the world's water was locked up in vast continental ice sheets. As a result, the Bering Sea was hundreds of meters below its current level, and a land bridge, known as Beringia, emerged in the middle of Asia and North America. At its peak, Beringia is thought to have been some 1,500 kilometers wide. A moist and treeless tundra, it was covered with grasses and plant life, attracting the large animals that early humans hunted for their survival.
The first population to reach North America did so without knowing they had crossed into a new continent. They would have been following game, as their ancestors had for thousands of years, along the Siberian coast and then across the land bridge.
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Once in Alaska, it would take these first North Americans thousands of years more to work their way through the openings in great glaciers south to what is now the United States. Evidence of early life in North America continues to be found. Petite of it, however, can be reliably dated before 12,000 B.C.; a recent discovery of a hunting lookout in northern Alaska, for example, may date from approximately that time. So too may the finely crafted spear points and items found near Clovis, New Mexico.
Similar artifacts have been found at sites throughout North and South America, indicating that life was probably already well established in much of the Western Hemisphere some time prior to 10,000 B.C. Colse to the time the gigantic began to die out and the bison took its place as a necessary source of food and hides for these early North Americans. Over time, as species of large game vanished whether from over hunting or natural causes plants, berries, and seeds became an increasingly prominent part of the early American diet. Gradually, foraging and the first attempts at primitive agriculture appeared. Native Americans in what is now central Mexico led the way, cultivating corn, squash, and beans, possibly as early as 8,000 B.C. Slowly, this knowledge spread northward.
By 3,000 B.C., a primitive type of corn was being grown in the river valleys of New Mexico and Arizona. Then the first signs of irrigation began to appear, and, by 300 B.C., signs of early village life.
By the first centuries A.D., the Hohokam were living in settlements near what is now Phoenix, Arizona, where they built ball courts and pyramid like mounds reminiscent of those found in Mexico, as well as a canal and irrigation system.
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