They are part of a continental story about how the Americas were peopled, how those founding populations diversified and adapted across thousands of years, and what the deep human history of North America actually looks like when examined with the tools that modern science provides.

The Americas were the last major landmasses on Earth to be permanently settled by human beings.

When the first populations crossed from northeast Asia into what is now Alaska — sometime before 15,000 years ago, and possibly considerably earlier — they were entering a continent that had never before known Homo sapiens.

The ecological disruptions that followed, including the extinction of many megafauna species, set the stage for the long Archaic period during which the populations of the Americas developed the varied, sophisticated adaptations that characterized human life across the continent before European arrival.

Texas sits at a critical geographic node in this story.