First Americans likely followed game across vanished Beringia
Paleo-Indians were the first peoples to enter the Americas near the end of the Late Pleistocene. Traditional models send big-game hunters from North Asia over the Beringia land bridge that existed about 45,000–12,000 BCE, then south through ice-free corridors around 16,500–13,500 BCE. Stone points and scrapers are the main surviving clues.
Frank H. H. Roberts coined Paleoindian in 1940 for old artifact assemblages adapted to vanished conditions; Hannah Marie Wormington in 1957 applied it to peoples before about 6000 years ago who made fluted points and lived among extinct animals. They hunted megafauna that mostly disappeared toward the period's end. Routes and dates remain actively debated.
A common narrative places migrants in Beringia between Siberia and Alaska about 17,000 years ago when glaciation lowered seas, then along herds into Alaska and beyond. Lithic styles define cultural phases when organic camps vanish. Isolated hunter-gatherer bands, not mass armies, likely made the crossing.
Whatever coastal or inland paths prevailed, Paleo-Indian archaeology is detective work with flakes: classifying projectile technology to reconstruct a peopling event larger than any single site can show.
Conventional estimates put the first arrivals in North America between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago, though some people may already have been in South America 25,000 years ago, and the period is usually said to close around 9000 to 8000 years before present. Some of the oldest traces lie in Alaska, followed by sites in northern British Columbia, western Alberta and the Yukon's Old Crow Flats. As glaciers retreated between roughly 17,500 and 14,500 years ago, big mammals began dying out; North America lost its camels and its horses, which returned only with the Spanish in the late fifteenth century. The Clovis culture, dated to around 11,500 BCE, is the best known, though scholars argue over whether its people specialised in big game or foraged broadly.
Source: Paleo-Indians
