Imagine a huge continent with no people at all – just land and animals. Many thousands of years ago, there were no people in North and South America.
No one knows for sure when or how the first people arrived. One idea is that long ago, hunters came from Asia to the northwestern part of the Americas. Over thousands of years, more and more people came from Asia. Slowly, their descendants spread south and east. Over time, these people, now called Indigenous peoples, settled all of North and South America. In the 1400s, they were the only humans living in the Americas. But soon, they would be joined by others from many places. Over the course of 500 years, these newcomers would make the United States a land of great diversity, or many differences.
