section_path: History/Pre-Columbian era
section_name: Pre-Columbian era
paragraph_text: Pre-Columbian era
  
  The indigenous peoples of the Americas have many creation myths, some of which assert that they have been present on the land since its creation, but there is no evidence that humans evolved there. The specifics of the initial settlement of the Americas by ancient Asians are subject to ongoing research and discussion. The traditional theory has been that hunters entered the Bering Land Bridge between eastern Siberia and present-day Alaska from 27,000 to 14,000 years ago. A growing viewpoint is that the first American inhabitants sailed from Beringia some 13,000 years ago, with widespread habitation of the Americas during the end of the Last Glacial Period, in what is known as the Late Glacial Maximum, around 12,500 years ago. The oldest petroglyphs in North America date from 15,000 to 10,000 years before present. Genetic research and anthropology indicate additional waves of migration from Asia via the Bering Strait during the Early-Middle Holocene.
  
  Prior to the arrival of European explorers and colonists in North America, the natives of North America were divided into many different polities, ranging from small bands of a few families to large empires. They lived in several culture areas, which roughly correspond to geographic and biological zones that defined the representative cultures and lifestyles of the indigenous people who lived there, including the bison hunters of the Great Plains and the farmers of Mesoamerica. Native groups also are classified by their language families, which included Athabaskan and Uto-Aztecan languages. Indigenous peoples with similar languages did not always share the same material culture, however, and were not necessarily always allies. Anthropologists speculate that the Inuit of the high Arctic arrived in North America much later than other native groups, evidenced by the disappearance of Dorset culture artifacts from the archaeological record and their replacement by the Thule people.
  
  During the thousands of years of native habitation on the continent, cultures changed and shifted. One of the oldest yet discovered is the Clovis culture (c. 9550–9050 BCE) in modern New Mexico. Later groups include the Mississippian culture and related Mound building cultures, found in the Mississippi River valley and the Pueblo culture of what is now the Four Corners. The more southern cultural groups of North America were responsible for the domestication of many common crops now used around the world, such as tomatoes, squash, and maize. As a result of the development of agriculture in the south, many other cultural advances were made there. The Mayans developed a writing system, built huge pyramids and temples, had a complex calendar, and developed the concept of zero around 400 CE.
  
  The first recorded European references to North America are in Norse sagas where it is referred to as Vinland. The earliest verifiable instance of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact by any European culture with the North America mainland has been dated to around 1000 CE. The site, situated at the northernmost extent of the island named Newfoundland, has provided unmistakable evidence of Norse settlement. Norse explorer Leif Erikson (c. 970–1020 CE) is thought to have visited the area. Erikson was the first European to make landfall on the continent (excluding Greenland).
  
  The Mayan culture was still present in southern Mexico and Guatemala when the Spanish conquistadors arrived, but political dominance in the area had shifted to the Aztec Empire, whose capital city Tenochtitlan was located further north in the Valley of Mexico. The Aztecs were conquered in 1521 by Hernán Cortés.