The story of the Americas cannot be considered or imagined without remembering the many groundbreaking accomplishments of the first inhabitants of the American continents. Some of the most amazing Native American facts of this very earliest exploration and settlement are listed here.
18,000 to 13,000 BC:
The first Americans arrived via an ice bridge that had formed during the last Ice Age. It linked Asia and Alaska for only a few hundred years. Stone and bone artifacts found in the Yukon indicate these earliest Native Americans relied on mammoths, bison, caribou, and camels for survival.
10,000 to 8,000 BC:
Postholes at the Hell Gap site in Wyoming are the earliest evidence of sheltered dwellings. Size seems to indicate the tents were single-family dwellings.
7,500 BC:
The earliest burial site is the Sloan site in Arkansas.
5,000 to 4,000 BC:
The cultivation of maize began. This tremendously important crop was developed from a wild native grass called teosinte.
2,400 BC:
The earliest known sherds of shaped and fired pottery were found at Stallings Island, Georgia.
1,500 BC:
Small villages began to form along riverbanks in eastern United States.
800 to 700 BC:
Cooks of the Poverty Point culture of the Mississippi River Valley used thousands of small irregularly shaped clay objects to cook America’s first soups and stews. The clay objects were placed in fire until they became red hot. They were then dropped into skins filled with water and food, where the heat from the clay objects cooked the contents of the bag without damaging the bag itself.
200 BC to AD 200:
The Hohokam people, ancestors of the Pima and Papago, developed an irrigation system in the Arizona desert. Hand-dug canals leading from the Gila River transported water more than 300 miles to irrigate more than 75,000 acres of farmland.
And the story continues.