The 9th millennium BCE in North American history provides a timeline of events occurring within the North American continent from 9000 years ago through 8001 BCE in the Gregorian calendar. Although this timeline segment may include some European or other world events that profoundly influenced later American life, it focuses on developments within Native American communities. The archaeological records supplements indigenous recorded and oral history.
Because of the inaccuracies inherent in radiocarbon dating and in interpreting other elements of the archaeological record, most dates in this timeline represent approximations that may vary a century or more from source to source. The assumptions implicit in archaeological dating methods also may yield a general bias in the dating in this timeline.
- 9000 BCE: Archaeological materials found on Channel Islands off the California coast
- 9000 BCE: Human settlers arrive in the Great Basin with its cool, wet prevailing climate
- 9000–8900 BCE: The Folsom culture in New Mexico leaves Bison bones and stone spear points.
- 8700 BCE: Human settlement reaches the Northwestern Plateau region.
- 8001 BC: The last glacial ends, causing sea levels to rise and flood the Beringia land bridge, closing the primary migration route from Siberia.
- 8001 BCE: Sufficient rain falls on the American Southwest to support many large mammal species--mammoth, mastodon, and a bison species-—that soon go extinct.
- 8001 BCE: Native Americans leave documented traces of their presence in every habitable corner of the Americas, including the American Northeast, the Pacific Northwest, and a cave on Prince of Wales Island in the Alexander archipelago of southeast Alaska, possibly following these game animals.
- 8001 BCE: Hunters in the American Southwest both use the atlatl.
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“The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greater part of the North American continent; but with it they have likewise extirpated the greater portion of the Red race. Civilization is gradually sweeping from the earth the lingering vestiges of Paganism, and at the same time the shrinking forms of its unhappy worshippers.”
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