The landscapes that would eventually be transformed by thousands of years of human activity were entirely without that dimension of transformation.

After the founding, the Americas became part of the human world.

Over the millennia following the initial peopling, human populations spread from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, adapting to every environment the continents offered.

Agriculture was independently invented in at least three or four separate regions of the Americas.

Monumental architecture was constructed in multiple traditions across North and South America.

Languages diversified into hundreds of distinct families.