blackfoot-valley

fierce sabre-tooth cats or “tigers”. Although they did not manage to wipe out the bears, those were hunted too. No slouches they! Hunting and gathering, including fishing, remained the only way of life in America and worldwide until well after the Ice Sheets began their retreat. Animal domestication and incipient agriculture got their start about 10,000 years ago in a part of the world not directly affected by the ice sheets: the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. In the Americas, the first plant known to have been domesticated was maize (or corn), a wild plant with tiny cobs, first farmed about 5,000 years ago in southern Mexico. As a cultivated crop, it slowly spread with other crops being added such as beans and squash. Farming very slowly diffused north and reached what is now the U.S. territory in the Southwest, erratically at first, close to 3,500 years ago, or about 1500 BC. The first successful ma- jor North American irrigation systems were developed by the Hohokam people in the Gila River drainage in southern Arizona around AD 300. Their system eventually expanded to some 300 miles of well-engineered irrigation canals. Permanent agriculture extended to American South and Midwest regions by AD 700. In Montana, the hunting of animals by men and the gathering of wild plants by women remained the primary way of life until Europeans ar- rived in large numbers during the late 1800’s, not much over a century ago. 46