Different tribes of Native Americans lived in the area that is now California for an estimated 13,000 to 15,000 years. Over 100 tribes and bands inhabited the area.[1] Various estimates of the Native American population in California during the pre-European period range from 100,000 to 300,000. California's population held about one-third of all native Americans in what is now the United States.[2]
The native hunter-gatherers practiced various forms of forest gardening and fire-stick farming in the forests, grasslands, mixed woodlands, and wetlands, ensuring that desired food and medicine plants continued to be available. The natives controlled fire on a regional scale to create a low-intensity fire ecology which prevented larger, catastrophic fires and sustained a low-density agriculture in loose rotation; a sort of "wild" permaculture