Wikibooks: Outline of U.S. History/Early America

• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bering Sea; glaciers; Tundra; Alaska; Beringia
• Online Access: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Outline_of_U.S._History/Early_America

Heaven and Earth never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation. Jamestown founder John Smith 1607 = The first Americans = At the height of the Ice Age between 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 between 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 people to reach North America almost certainly 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. 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. Little 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 almost 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 by some time prior to 10 000 B.C. Around that time the mammoth began to die out and the bison took its place as a principal source of food and hides for these early North Americans. Over time as more and more species of large game vanished—whether from overhunting or natural causes—plants berries and seeds became an increasingly important part of the early American diet. Gradually foraging and the first attempts at primitive agriculture appeared. Native Americans in what is now ...