Early American history began in the collision of European, West African, and Native American peoples in North America. Europeans discovered America by accident, then created empires out of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. Yet conquest and enslavement were accompanied by centuries of cultural interaction-interaction that spelled disaster for Africans and Native Americans and triumph for Europeans, to be sure, but interaction that transformed all three peoples in the process. ANative America in 1580 The lands and human societies that European explorers called a New World were in fact very old. During the Ice Ages much of the world's water was bound up in glaciers. Sea level dropped by hundreds of feet, creating a land bridge between Alaska and Siberia. Asians walked across to become the first human inhabitants of the Americas. Scientists disagree on when this happened, but most estimates say it was around 30,000 years ago.
When the last glaciers receded about 10,000 years ago , ancestors of the Native Americans filled nearly all of the habitable parts of North and South America. They lived in isolation from the history-and particularly from the diseases-of what became known as the Old World. The Native Americans who greeted the first Europeans had become diverse peoples. They spoke between 300 and 350 distinct languages, and their societies and ways of living varied tremendously. The Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru built great empires . In what is now the United States, the Mississippians built cities surrounded by farmland between present-day St. Louis, Missouri, and Natchez, Mississippi. The Mississippians king ruled authoritatively and was carried from place to place by servants, preceded by flute-players.
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