Video - Native Americans, from earliest arrivals up to Aztecs.

[wnylib]

Video is over 1 hour long, but so informative for an overal view that it is worth watching all at once if you have the time, or saving it to watch in segments. You can just skip the annoying YouTube commercial interruptions as I did..

Thus is a comprehensive documentary of the first people in the Americas, from the earliest arrivals up to 1491, before Europeans. Takes you into the world of those first Americans, what their environment was like, how they survived, and their adaptations and innovations.

Describes early developments in the stages labeled by anthropologists into 3 periods: Paleo (first arrivals), Archaic (spread through the continents with adaptations and changing tool cultures), Woodland (post glacial period). After that, tribal identies and groupings developed and developments varied by regions. Those developments are also covered, from early villages, first agriculture to the first known civilization (Caral in Peru).

Includes ancient Great Lakes Copper Culture (4000 to 6000 years ago), Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippian Cultures, Pueblo and Zuni ancestors, arrival of Navajo (Dine), origins and migrations of Lakota and Dakota, Maya, and Aztec civilizations.

?si=sC6AYrYgmMsGNm15

[littlemissmartypants]

1. 📌 Native Americans, from earliest arrivals up to Aztecs

Bookmark.

Thank you. ❤️

[calimary]

2. Most interesting!

[wnylib]

3. I've had some courses on the Paleo and Archaic

Last edited Mon Jul 6, 2026, 02:42 PM - Edit history (1)

Periods in the Americas and try to keep up on them on my own as new info comes out, but Iearned some new things from this video.

Example: I knew about the ancient Great Lake's Copper Culture, but had been taught that they did not know about smelting rocks to extract the copper. They were supposed to have just picked up fairly pure nuggets for hammering into shapes. But the video cites evidence that they did use smelting and also used heating and rapid cooling to crack the copper ore off of the walls of mines. So they also had some mines and sophisticated techniques.

Also, I did not know about the genetic differences between the descendants of Clovis people and the Native people of South America.

I was happy to see that one of my hypotheses about Clovis is confirmed now by evidence. When archaeologists started coming up with site dates older than Clovis, it seemed likely to me that the older populations of people in Mesoamerica or South America probably developed the Clovis points to deal with large mammals and were so successful at it that the technology spread north into North America. Now the evidence supports that.