... different times. These widely dispersed tribes of Native Americans differed from one another in government, customs, language, housing, social organization, and methods of survival. No one knows for sure when or how the first Americans arrived in what is now the United States. It may have been as long as 70,000 years ago or as recently as 12,000 years. Even if the shorter length is correct, Native Americans have been on the continent thirty times longer than the Europeans. European colonists did not begin arriving on the East Coast of North America until the late 1500's. What were the early Americans doing for those centuries? The answer is shrouded in mystery to a great extent. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison noted this when he said, "Even now we cannot write 'The History of America before 1492' because history presupposes a more or less continuous and dated story." There is no ...

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