The First Americans Whether on land, along Bering Sea coasts or across seasonal ice, humans crossed Beringia from Asia to enter North America about 13,000 or more years ago. Humans were latecomers to this magnificent land mass so widely separated from other continents by vast oceans except near Earth’s poles.

The earliest populations in the Americas, before roughly 10,000 years ago, are known as Paleo-Indians.

about 20,000 years ago

Bering Land Bridge

For decades archaeologists thought the first Americans were the Clovis people, who were said to have reached the New World some 13,000 years ago from northern Asia. But fresh archaeological finds have established that humans reached the Americas thousands of years before that.

Norte Chico

Norte Chico civilization

South America is thought to have been first inhabited by humans when people were crossing the Bering Land Bridge (now the Bering Strait) at least 15,000 years ago from the territory that is present-day Russia. They migrated south through North America, and eventually reached South America through the Isthmus of Panama.

Explorer Christopher Columbus

• South America.
• South American forest Indian.
• South American nomad.
• American Indian.
• Andean peoples.
• Inca.
• Moche.
• Araucanian.

Latin America is home to over 800 different indigenous peoples, with a total population of 45 million people.

When anthropologist Tom Dillehay, now at Vanderbilt University, began working at a site called Monte Verde in southern Chile in 1977, most archaeologists thought the first humans moved into South America from North America about 11,000 years ago, he says.

Scientists have found that Native American populations – from Canada to the southern tip of Chile – arose from at least three migrations, with the majority descended entirely from a single group of First American migrants that crossed over through Beringia, a land bridge between Asia and America that existed during the …