MAP 1.1 The Ice Age and the Settling of the Americas
Some sixteen thousand years ago, a sheet of ice covered much of Europe and North America. The ice lowered the level of the world’s oceans, which created a broad bridge of land between Siberia and Alaska. Using that land bridge, hunting peoples from Asia migrated to North America as they pursued woolly mammoths and other large game animals and sought ice-free habitats. By 10,000 B.C., the descendants of these migrant peoples had moved south to present-day Florida and central Mexico. In time, they would settle as far south as the tip of South America and as far east as the Atlantic coast of North America.