blackfoot-valley

Earliest Peoples and Man-made Environments As nearly everywhere in the United States, or the world for that mat- ter, the natural landscape of the Nevada / Blackfoot Valley, including the Ranch lands, has been modified - deliberately or inadvertently - by man. In prehistoric times - 12,000 - 14,000 years ago, according to the long - established view - hunter-gatherers had migrated from northern Asia across the then - existing Bering land bridge to what is now America by taking advantage of a narrow ice-free corridor that opened the way south just east of the Canadian Rockies when the two great adjoining ice sheets receded a bit. But a human site discovered in far-off southern Chile, called Monte Verde, has been dated and is now accepted by most archeologists as 14,800 years old. That would mean, if we assume its people came via North America, that their ancestors were here well before that time while making their necessarily slow migrations south. Also some sites, claiming to be as old or older in North America, are being intensively studied, though challenged, ranging from Pennsylvania (dated at 19,000 years old) to Virginia (dated at 18,000 years old) to Florida, and the Ameri- can West. Many researchers now believe that human settlement in Ameri- ca date as far back as 20,000 to 30,000 years, and a few have suggested 44