It began when an arc of volcanoes ruptured the floor of the ancient Iapetus Ocean south of Gondwana, where the continents of Africa and South America lay interlocked. An island chain dubbed Avalonia rose at 60 degrees S on a platform of volcanic rocks and granite.
When the continents joined in Pangaea - "All Earth" - Avalonia's shores ground up against the bulge of equatorial Africa. Dinosaurs roamed this new world crossing freely from one landmass to another, until the crustal plates began to tear apart.
Early Cretaceous Dinosaurs in Gondwanaland
North America rifted from Africa. A trench opened for the waters of the North Atlantic that ebbed and flowed for one hundred and eighty million years as the ocean floor spread. Only twenty million years ago did the Avalonian terrane begin to resemble the land we see today.
USGS, Understanding Plate Motions
The ice sheet moved slowly, only a few inches or a few feet a day, but move it did.
At the place where the glacier was born, the ice dome rose two miles into the sky. Impelled by its own weight, the juggernaut spread outwards.
Global warming turned meltwater runnels into torrents that carved out channels, bored into crevasses and drove passages through ice. Rushing streams deposited till along the glacier's terminus and margins forming ridged moraines.
Meltwater streaming through subglacial conduits left serpentine tunnels strewn with sand, gravel and mud; when the ice casts melted away, long sinuous eskers snaked across the earth.
Eskers (Lake Maurice National Park, Canada.)
Ice cliffs broke away to stand like megaliths on the new ground, until the sun melted the blocks leaving kettle-shaped holes to form lakes and ponds.
The destroyer became the builder. The glacier worked the mounds over and over, smoothing and rounding them into elongated drumlin hills that remained buried in ice.
Mastadon and woolly mammoth found refuge along the coastal corridor. Giant short-faced bears and five hundred pound beavers joined the migration to the open spruce forest and lush grasslands flourishing on the continental shelf.
Twenty thousand years ago, while pioneers of the ice frontier braved Beringia, a continent away Stone Age hunters with Clovis-like weapons preyed on herds of horses running free south of the European ice-shelf.
Known to us as Solutreans, from the paleolithic site of Solutré in south-west France.
Solutrean horse-hunters, courtesy Old Stone Age
Dr. Dennis Stanford focused his attention on the seemingly impossible voyage of a Stone-Age Columbus: Answers came from the likeliest of all places and people, the Eskimos of Barrow, Alaska. As in ages past, the Eskimos still take to the sea in whaling boats crafted with sealskin and wood and bound with caribou sinews.
Eskimo Family, Wikipedia/National Geographic
When Stanford showed an Eskimo woman a bone needle, she saw nothing extraordinary in the item, similar to needles her own grandmother used to sew caribou garments with waterproof seams. “This needle is 20,000 years old,” said Dr. Stanford, the relic from the Solutreans who would’ve used such needles to fashion clothing for their long voyage.
Solutrean needle and fish hook, Wikipedia
No finds were are dramatic than those at Topper in Allendale County, South Carolina.
In 2002, Topper artifacts returned a radiocarbon dating of 16,000-20,000 years ago. Two years later, stone age tools embedded in a white sand stone with a layer of charcoal dated to 50,000 years ago.
Topper artifacts, courtesy Topper Site Virtual Museum
In the 1970s, one of the earliest challenges to the Clovis Firsters came from James Adovasio excavating below the 13,500-year level at Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania: Adovasio’s meticulously detailed analysis dated occupation of the shelter to 16,000 years ago.
Meadowcroft Rockshelter photo, Mark McConaughy
Meadowcroft excavation site enclosure. Examination of the site revealed fire pits and large burned areas of fire floors, refuse and storage pits, concentrations of stone artifacts, ceramics and bone that suggest the presence of specialized work areas, and roasting pits.
Meadowcroft Excavation Site, courtesy Heinz History Center
Clovis point spearhead that transfixed American archaeologists for sixty years was uncovered in a dried up lake bed near Clovis, New Mexico in 1929.
Mammoth bones found in the proximity enabled scientists to date this kill to 13,500 years ago, making the projectile then the oldest Stone Age artifact discovered on the continent.
Clovis Point photo, courtesy National Park Service
Cahokia, A.D. 1150, citadel of a Mississippian mound-building culture outside present-day St. Louis, Missouri: Already occupied for five hundred years, the mid-twelfth century saw the Golden Age of Cahokia, then larger than London and possessing 20,000 residents.
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Cahokia 1150 A.D., painting by William R. Iseminger
A royal mound dominated the landscape rising one hundred feet, a flat-topped pyramid on a tiered base greater in circumference than Khufu at Giza or the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, Mexico. A forty-acre grand ceremonial plaza was flanked by twenty or so smaller mounds and enclosed by a two-mile long log palisade buttressed with bastions at regular intervals.
[Wikipedia]
"Bird-man" (1200-1400) on a repoussé copper plate from the Etowah site, Georgia.
An example of work of stunning artistry flowing from a social and trade network that reached from Florida and the Gulf Coast to Lake Superior.
This vibrant culture endured for four centuries from 900 A.D. to 1350 A.D. with the City by the Rivers at the center of its world
Texas Beyond History, University of Texas at Austin.]
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca wandered the Southwest, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of three other survivors, including Esteban, a black Moroccan.
On occasion brutally handled by his captors, Cabeza de Vaca rose to be an itinerant trader and healer, his cures making him a proto-type of the wandering miracle-worker evangelists of centuries to come.
Cabeza de Vaca’s seven-year-odyssey ended with a hero’s welcome in Mexico City in 1536, his epic adventure written down and published as Le Relación in 1542.
Cabeza de Vaca mural, Ojinaga, Mexico
From May 1539 until Hernando De Soto’s death from fever in the spring of 1542, the army marched from Florida north through Georgia and the Carolinas, west into Tennessee, back down through northwestern Georgia, and into Alabama. Encounters with the Southeast Indians were mixed, sometimes amicable, sometimes a repeat of the conquistador’s bloody passage through the lands of the Inca.
[Courtesy, Library of Congress]
In February 1540, the conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado left Compostela five hundred miles northwest of Mexico City, going to seek the Seven golden cities of Cibola. "It was the most brilliant company ever assembled in the Indies to go in search of new lands," wrote Pedro de Castaneda in his record of the expedition that lasted two years and penetrated as far inland as the plains of modern Kansas.
Coronado portrait, courtesy PBS, The West
Quivira, A.D. 1540, the "El Dorado" sought by the conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado on his expedition from Mexico City north to Tierra Neuva. Coronado penetrated the heartland crossing endless plains through Texas, Oklahoma and into Kansas.
Coronado Sets Out to the North by Frederic Remington, Wikipedia
At St. Augustine, Florida in 1602, a royal investigator was sent from Havana to decide the future of La Florida. Eighteen veterans, some in the colony since its founding in 1565, took the stand and except for one old nay-sayer recommending abandonment, the rest were unanimous: “Stay!” they declared, as committed to America as those who came after them.
St. Augustine, 1580, depiction by Noel Sickles (Courtesy of St. Augustine Foundation, Flagler College), see also St. Augustine, America's Ancient City]
Horse-drawn carros crossing a river, trekking on Camino Real, late-sixteenth century trail to Santa Fe, New Mexico
courtesy Museum of New Mexico
On July 22, 1587, 116 men, women and children landed on Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina, the second English settlement sponsored by Walter Raleigh.
Raleigh's enterprise was launched under a charter granted by Elizabeth I to discover and colonize the “remote heathen and barbarous lands of North America.”
Sir Walter Raleigh, painting by Nicholas Hillard, Wikipedia Commons
Indians dancing around a circle of posts, watercolor by John White, circa 1585
A contemporary writer placed the celebration at Secotan, the second figure at the bottom may be Wingina (Pemispan), a chief of Roanoke.
courtesy, Virtual Jamestown, John White images licensed by the Trustees of the British Museum. ©Copyright the British Museum
Chief Powhatan's deerskin mantle with Shell Map, circa 1608 preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
The mantle symbolically depicts the
balance of power among southeastern Indians of the Chesapeake tidewater region.
courtesy Powhatan's Deerskin Mantleat she-philosopher.com, which has an impressive description of this artifact
The second Roanoke colony was left to its own devices for three years during the sea war between England and Spain that climaxed with the Armada.
Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 5 August 1588. artist Loutherbourg,
courtesy National Maritime Museum, Greenwich U.K., Wikipedia Commons