Maya invented zero centuries before the Old World
Agriculture arose independently in North America’s Eastern Woodlands and Mesoamerica. Southern peoples domesticated tomatoes, squash, and—crucially—maize. The Maya built pyramids, kept a complex calendar, wrote in script, and used zero about 500 years before anyone in the Old World. By 1500, estimates put the continent near 9.75 million people.
How and when people first reached the Americas stays contested. The familiar model sends migrants across Beringia between about 40,000 and 17,000 years ago, following megafauna through ice-free corridors—or perhaps down a Pacific coast now drowned by rising seas. Some finds may push presence back another 90,000 years. Genetic, linguistic, and blood-type links point to Asian, especially eastern Siberian, origins, though older Europe-migration ideas still circulate. After climate stabilized around 8000–7000 BCE, populations grew and lithic toolkits diversified into more sedentary regional traditions.
Before Europeans arrived, polities ranged from tiny kin bands to empires, sorted by culture area and language family more than by simple tribe lists. Archaic peoples adapted to a warmer, drier world after megafauna vanished, mixing small game, fish, and wild plants. Farming then transformed the south: Hohokam and Ancestral Pueblo societies irrigated villages for at least two millennia before Spaniards appeared in the 1540s. On the Plains, village farmers also hunted bison. Maya civilization layered writing, monumental architecture, calendrics, and mathematical zero onto that agrarian base; when Spaniards reached Central America, Aztec power had already eclipsed Maya political dominance farther north.
Angus Maddison’s figures for 1500 estimate about 7.5 million in pre-Hispanic Mexico, roughly 250,000 in what became Canada, and 2 million in what became the United States—about 9.75 million total. By 2020 indigenous peoples numbered some 34 million across those three countries, about 7 percent of a 331.4 million continental population.
Documented European contact begins with Norse Greenland settlement from 985, lasting into the early 1400s, plus short-lived Vinland exploration around 1000 at L’Anse aux Meadows. Columbus reached the Bahamas in 1492; Cabot, Verrazzano, and Cartier followed. Spain seized Caribbean islands and the Aztec realm; Cortés founded Veracruz in 1519. France planted Port Royal (1604) and Quebec (1608) around the fur trade; England’s Jamestown (1607) and Plymouth (1620) anchored the Atlantic seaboard. Independence wars and Canada’s 1867 Confederation later redrew a map still marked by those three colonial languages and legal traditions.
Source: History of North America
