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1. Turtle Island
From Canadian History Portal - HCO
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Canada Takes Shape
3,600,000,000 billion years ago the Canadian land mass emerged as part of the super continent Pangaea . Three billion years later, the plates of Pangaea started breaking apart like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, with the Laurentia plate splitting off, moving west and becoming part of the present Canadian Shield, and the Avalon or Acadia plate cracking off 1600 km south and moving north.
Two hundred million years later, Alberta's great oil & coal deposits were laid down in swamps of the Devonian and Carboniferous periods. In 300,000,000 BC, the Avalon plate collided with the Laurentia plate, pushing up the Appalachian Mountains, the oldest on the continent.
North America began to take shape in about 100,000,000 BC, when Laurentia-Avalon colliding with Wrangellia-Stikina in the west pushed up the Rockies and coast mountains. By 80,000,000 BC, Canada wasin almost the same position as today; but the earth's axis was tilted in a different direction. The climate was much warmer, and dinosaurs thrived around a vast inland sea stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Age of Mammals
In 20,000,000 BCE, the first mammals - camels, horses, mastodons, mammoths, and giant sloths,- migrated from Asia when the Bering Sea between Asian and North America was dry land. In 3,000,000 BCE, the world entered 4 distinct stages of glaciation; referred to, in North America as the Nebraskan, Kansan, Illinoian, and Wisconsian periods.– They were divided by intervals of warmer weather lasting many thousands of years. It is thought that our ancestors evolved in Africa during these periods.
It is speculated that the first humans reached North America around 200,000 BCE, when the Illinoian glaciation, that covered most of Canada, began to recede. These people, called Homo Erectus, hunted large animals, and used tools made of flaked bones and flint. There is also a theory that these early hunters may have driven the mastodons and mammoths to extinction.
In South America the oldest human remains, at about 45,000 years old, were discovered in Chilean caves.
The earliest evidence of human settlement found in Canada comes from the Old Crow Basin of the northern Yukon. Here archaeologists found some evidence of hunting and butchering from bone chips that may date from as early as 150,000 BC.
In 80,000 BCE, the Wisconsian ice sheet started to move south across Baffin Island and Labrador. It covered Hudson Bay and crushed everything in its path in southern Canada as far as Ohio. This last and largest glaciation reached its greatest extent about 19,000 BCE. Only the Pacific coast and the valleys of Old Crow were ice free. Old Crow was part of Beringia, a treeless ice-free plain that included Alaska and the Yukon. It was an extension of the steppes of Asia and a corridor through which large herds of migratory animals reached North America.
In 1966, Peter Lord and C.R. Harrington found scrapers or flensers made of caribou tibia, similar to present-day Inuit tools, near Old Crow. These were carbon-dated to 27,000 BCE. The only human remains found at Old Crow date from 20,000 BCE - the jawbone of a domesticated dog and the skeleton of a 12-year-old child.
Meanwhile, far to the south, the Wisconsian glacier retreated.This caused, around 13,000 BCE, a new waterfall, known today as Niagara to form.
In 8000 BCE, Lake Superior emerged from glacial run-off leaving western Canada largely ice-free. After 6,000 BCE, most of the Wisconsian glaciation had disappeared from Ontario and Quebec. Lake Agassiz, that once covered 285,000 sq. km. of southern Manitoba, drained out through the Great Lakes system.
After the Glaciers
With glacial retreat came human advance. About 14,000 BCE, groups of Paleolithic people travelled down ice-free corridors through the Rockies to the warmer American west and mid-west. The first Paleolithic hunting and butchering sites, dating from 10,000 BCE, were found near Clovis, New Mexico. As the climate of North America warmed, these "Plano people moved east and north to follow woolly mammoths and bison up the St. Lawrence, Red River and Fraser valleys.
These people were skilled at making fluted projectile points for their spears and arrowheads out of flint, chert or quartzite. The earliest evidence of people in southern Canada, about 9000 BCE, was found at Parkhill, Ontario on the shores of Lake Huron.
Neolithic stone age people continued to reach North America, and the last groups of Siberians across the land bridge before it flooded and became the Bering Strait, are likely the ancestors of todays northern Athapaskans (Dene), while the Aleuts in southern Alaska date from about 6,500 BCE.
Trade relations developed among different Paleolithic peoples. As early as 7,250 BCE, Plano people living on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron quarried flint and quartz that they made into arrowheads and spears for trade. The stone chalcedony from North Dakota was carved into pipes and bartered as far away as northern Alberta and the Maritimes.
Farther north, as larger animals became extinct, the Archaic Boreal people hunted caribou near the tree line and the retreating ice sheet as early as 7,000 BCE. They were the first inhabitants of the Canadian Arctic mainland. During this same time period the Maritime Archaic culture, ancestors of the Beothuks, Micmacs and Malecites, moved north as far as Labrador. By 6,000 BC, the Shield Archaic (Acasta) culture, ancestors of the Alkonkian, Crees and Ojibway people, had moved to the Barren Ground west of Hudson Bay to hunt caribou.
The First Settlements
By 4,000 BCE, the same time as the first city states were forming in the Middle East, the first nations of North America began to form distinct boundaries and cultures. The Maritime Archaic culture appeared in Newfoundland; they were the ancestors of the Beothuks. In Southern Ontario, the Laurentian Archaic culture were the first major population; they lived on caribou and fish. Farther north, the Archaic peoples mined native copper around Lake Superior, hammered it into awls and fish hooks, or traded it in chunks to their neighbours. In the Northwest, the Neskip culture spread along the Pacific coast; they were the ancestors of the Pacific Coast Culture.
A thousand years later, the first evidence of religious belief appeared on the Prairies - medicine wheels crafted in about 3,000 BCE by communal bison hunters, at about the same time as the Egyptians were building their pyramids. By 2,000 BCE, the nations of the present day Canadian plains traded dentilium marine shells for wampum and decoration as far as the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic.
Farther south a major new food technology emerged, when aboriginals first domesticated corn (maize) in New Mexico. This food reached Ontario in 500 CE, and was one of the foundation stones of Iroquois and Huron settlement. Corn could also be dried and stored, and was an excellent trade good.
In the Great Lakes basin, about 1,500 years ago, the Hopewellian people started to build serpentine burial tombs. The most noteworthy in Ontario is Serpent Mounds in Rice Lake, named for the stands of wild rice that are still harvested along its shores by Ojibway people. 500 years later, these people produced the first pottery and grew the first tobacco in Ontario.
At this time, the early Micmac and Maliceet people produced the first pottery made in New Brunswick.
Finally dentilium shell (wampum), unearthed by archaeologists in British Columbia, established that there was a transcontinental trading system.
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