Earliest Human Occupation of Great Basin

The Great Basin has been occupied by people since prehistoric North America, around 10,000 years ago. The earliest evidence comes from pre-Clovis projectile points dated to over 13,000 years ago.

When this happened

Earliest Human Occupation of Great Basin occurred in around 10,000 years ago, during the pre-columbian period of American history.

Where this happened

Earliest Human Occupation of Great Basin took place in Nevada. Explore the full history of Nevada and primary source records from this era.

Indigenous peoples had inhabited North America for at least 15,000 years before European contact, developing complex societies across every region of the continent. The Mississippian culture, centered on the city of Cahokia near present-day St. Louis, reached its peak around 1100 AD with a population estimated at 10,000 to 20,000 — larger than contemporary London. The Ancestral Puebloans built multi-story stone complexes at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde between the 9th and 13th centuries. The Iroquois Confederacy, formed between roughly 1450 and 1600, united five nations under a constitution that influenced later American democratic thinking. Across the eastern woodlands, the Great Plains, the Pacific Coast, and the Southwest, hundreds of distinct nations maintained sophisticated trade networks, agricultural systems, and governance structures. European contact beginning in the late 15th century introduced epidemic disease — smallpox, measles, influenza — which devastated Indigenous populations by an estimated 50 to 90 percent within a century.

Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Source: Wikipedia: History.