![[Pasted image 20250201162639.png]] Continually moving southward, the settlers eventually populated both North and South America, creating unique cultures that ranged from the highly complex and urban [[Aztec]] civilization in what is now Mexico City to the woodland tribes of eastern North America. Recent research along the west coast of South America suggests that migrant populations may have traveled down this coast by water as well as by land. Travelers reached a site called Monte Verde in what is now southern Chile over 14,800 years ago, for example, long before there was an ice-free overland route, suggesting that at least some of the new Native Americans already knew how to make canoes or kayaks.  Researchers have also discovered  that beginning about ten thousand years ago, humans all over the world began domesticating  plants and animals, adding agriculture and pastoralism as a means of sustenance to the hunting and gathering techniques humans have used since our species’ origin in Africa. With this agricultural revolution and the more abundant and reliable food supplies it brought, populations grew and people were able to develop a more settled way of life, building permanent settlements and more complex social structures. Nowhere in the Americas was this more obvious than in Central America. --- Next: [[1.3 Mesoamerica]] Back: [[1.1 The Americas]]