EARLY AMERICANS
North and South America are the New World not only because Columbus blundered into them, making them new for western civilization in the 1400s, but because people from eastern Siberia wandered there about 14,500 years earlier and made them new for all of humankind. A thousand or so years later, nearly one third of the habitable world in the Americas had been discovered and populated by these first Americans. Previously, the flora and fauna of North America had an evolutionary and ecological history completely apart from the influence of humans. But that was all about to change.