Americas’ first farmers reshaped half the world’s crops
Before Columbus’s 1492 landfall, millennia of Indigenous societies built cities, earthworks, and hierarchies across the Americas. Paleo-Indians entered via Beringia, and later farmers domesticated plants that now supply an estimated 50 to 60 percent of global agriculture.
The pre-Columbian—or pre-contact, pre-Hispanic, pre-Cabraline—era runs from Upper Paleolithic peopling to European colonization. Many complex societies had already faded before permanent colonies took hold in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Until the 1800s, historians leaned on conquerors’ chronicles and travellers’ notes; only then did John Lloyd Stephens, Eduard Seler, Alfred Maudslay, and institutions such as the Peabody Museum begin rebuilding these cultures from excavated ruins.
Genetic work ties Indigenous ancestry strongly to Y-chromosome haplogroup Q1a3a, present in South America for at least 18,000 years. Founding groups likely lingered on Beringia for about 20,000 years before spreading, perhaps partly along the coast. Clovis sites date near 13,000 years ago, though older claims reach 20,000; artifacts dated to 14,000 years ago suggest people may already have reached Cape Horn.
After ice-age climates stabilized about 10,000 years ago, hundreds of cultures diverged. Mobile bands of roughly 20 to 50 relatives hunted and gathered; Arctic and coastal groups often stayed that way while temperate zones adopted farming. Complex societies emerged some seven to eight thousand years ago; by about 5500 BCE, Lower Mississippi peoples at Monte Sano and nearby sites were raising monumental earthworks.
Poverty Point, long thought the oldest mound complex, dates to about 1500 BCE and anchors a culture of more than 100 sites on both banks of the Mississippi; its core is six nested half-rings of earth. The Woodland period, a term coined in the 1930s for roughly 1000 BCE to 1000 CE, saw the Adena and then Hopewell peoples build great earthworks and trade across the continent. The Mississippian culture that followed spread from the Atlantic to the plains edge and from the Gulf to the Upper Midwest, marked by clusters of large earthen mounds.
Source: Pre-Columbian era
