[Prehistory - 1496] Dawn of the First Peoples

Before the maps were drawn, before the arrival of sails on the eastern horizon, the story of the land we now call Canada was already ancient, etched into stone, soil, and memory. It is a story that begins in the biting cold of the last great Ice Age, a time when much of the continent lay crushed beneath the colossal weight of the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets, glaciers in some places more than two kilometers thick. This was not an empty world, but a formidable one, roamed by woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths, and sabre-toothed cats. Into this challenging landscape, sometime between 30,000 and 13,000 years ago, came the first people. They did not arrive as conquerors, but as survivors. Small, nomadic bands of hunters trekking from Asia across a land bridge named Beringia—a vast, cold steppe connecting modern Siberia and Alaska, now submerged beneath the Bering Strait. Genetic and archaeological evidence, including tantalizing clues from sites like the Bluefish Caves in the Yukon where cut-marked animal bones suggest human activity as far back as 24,000 years ago, paints a picture of a slow, generational migration. These Paleo-Indians were master hunters, armed with a revolutionary piece of technology: the Clovis point. This distinctive, fluted spearhead, meticulously chipped from flint or chert, was lethally effective against the megafauna that provided their sustenance—food, clothing, and tools. As the glaciers began their slow, groaning retreat around 15,000 years ago, these pioneers followed ice-free corridors, spreading south and east into a continent being reborn. The world warmed, and the great beasts vanished. The hunter’s way of life had to adapt or perish. This shift marks the beginning of the Archaic period, stretching roughly from 10,000 to 3,000 years ago. The singular focus on massive game gave way to a more diverse and resourceful existence. People became intimately familiar with the rhythms of their own territory, a lifestyle archaeologists call seasonal rounding. They fished for salmon in the rivers, gathered nuts and berries in the forests, and hunted smaller game like caribou and deer. Their toolkit expanded in sophistication. The atlatl, or spear-thrower, became common—a simple but ingenious device that acted as a lever, allowing a hunter to throw a spear with far greater velocity and force. On the shores of the Great Lakes, a remarkable innovation occurred. Beginning over 6,000 years ago, the people of the Old Copper Complex began mining veins of nearly pure copper and cold-hammering the metal into a vast array of tools and ornaments: spear points, knives, fishhooks, and awls. This was one of the earliest examples of metalworking anywhere in the world. As millennia passed, this adaptation fostered breathtaking diversity. The single story of the first peoples fractured into a thousand different tales, each shaped by a unique landscape. On the Pacific Coast, from the rainforests of what is now British Columbia, the sea provided a bounty unlike anywhere else. The predictable, massive runs of salmon became the bedrock of society, allowing for the development of large, permanent villages. Here, societies grew complex and hierarchical. Wealth, measured in blankets, canoes, and preserved food, could be accumulated and displayed. This was the culture of the potlatch, an elaborate ceremonial feast where powerful chiefs would validate their status by giving away—or even destroying—vast quantities of possessions. Their artistry was, and is, legendary. Towering cedar totem poles, carved with the crests of ravens, eagles, and bears, chronicled family lineages and mythologies. They lived in monumental plank houses, some large enough to shelter hundreds of people, their air thick with the smell of cedar smoke and drying fish. To the east, on the vast, windswept plains, life revolved around another creature: the buffalo. For thousands of years, the peoples of the Plains hunted these animals on foot, a dangerous and difficult task requiring immense cooperation. They engineered sophisticated traps, driving herds over cliffs in a terrifying, thundering stampede. One such site, Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta, was used continuously for nearly 6,000 years, the layers of bones at its base a testament to countless successful hunts. Every part of the animal was used: the meat for food, the hide for clothing and the covering of tipis—conical dwellings that were masterpieces of mobile architecture—the bones for tools, and the sinew for thread. Life was nomadic, following the great herds across the grasslands under an immense sky. In the Eastern Woodlands, a different kind of revolution took root. Around 500 CE, agriculture, which had been transforming societies to the south for centuries, arrived in the form of the “Three Sisters”—corn, beans, and squash. This reliable food source allowed for larger, more permanent settlements. The Iroquoian-speaking peoples, like the Wendat and the nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, built fortified villages of longhouses. These were impressive structures, long, narrow dwellings framed with saplings and covered in bark, each one home to multiple related families through the maternal line. Society was matrilineal; property and status were passed down through the women, and Clan Mothers held the power to appoint and depose the male chiefs who governed. Their political systems were sophisticated, culminating in the formation of powerful confederacies that governed vast territories through councils and consensus. Farthest north, in a landscape of ice and snow, lived the masters of arctic survival. The Dorset people, a Paleo-Eskimo culture, inhabited the Arctic from about 500 BCE to 1000 CE, living in semi-subterranean sod houses and hunting seals and walrus with harpoons. They were supplanted by a new wave of migrants, the Thule, the direct ancestors of the modern Inuit. The Thule brought with them a toolkit of profound ingenuity: the toggling harpoon head that locked inside its prey, the sleek and swift kayak for hunting, the larger umiak for travel, and the iconic igloo, a dome of snow whose brilliant design trapped heat. They crafted tailored clothing from caribou and seal skin, with an inner layer of fur turned inward and an outer layer turned outward, creating an insulated barrier against temperatures that could freeze a person in minutes. Their survival was a triumph of knowledge passed through generations. These diverse worlds were not isolated. A vast and intricate web of trade routes crisscrossed the continent. Obsidian for sharp tools, quarried in the mountains of British Columbia, has been found in archaeological sites in Ontario. Copper from the Great Lakes region made its way to the Plains. Marine shells from the Atlantic coast were traded deep into the continental interior. These were not primitive, disconnected bands, but a continent of nations, vibrant with culture, trade, politics, and spirituality. By 1496, this land was home to millions of people, speaking hundreds of distinct languages, living within complex societies that had been evolving for millennia. They were unaware that far across the great eastern ocean, a new kind of ship was being prepared, one that would carry strangers who would change their world forever.