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.
Famous quotes containing the words millennium, north, american and/or history:
“The millennium will not come as soon as women vote, but it will not come until they do vote.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.”
—Philip Guedalla (1889–1944)
“I should think the American admiration of five-minute tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)