After the voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1492, Spanish, Portuguese and later English, French and Dutch colonial expeditions arrived in the New World, conquering and settling the discovered lands, which led to a transformation of the cultural and physical landscape in the Americas.
Spain colonized most of the American continent from present-day Southwestern United States, Florida and the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America.
The Lithic stage or Paleo-Indian period, is the earliest classification term referring to the first stage of human habitation in the Americas, covering the Late Pleistocene epoch.
The time period derives its name from the appearance of "Lithic flaked" stone tools.
First, it shows that Upper Paleolithic Siberians came from a cosmopolitan population of early modern humans that spread out of Africa to Europe and Central and South Asia.
Second, Paleoindian skeletons with phenotypic traits atypical of modern-day Native Americans can be explained as having a direct historical connection to Upper Paleolithic Siberia." A route through Beringia is seen as more likely than the Solutrean hypothesis.
The Netherlands settled New Netherland (administrative centre New Amsterdam - now New York), some Caribbean islands and parts of Northern South America.
The prehistory of the Americas (North, South, and Central America, and the Caribbean) begins with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an Ice Age.The most popular theory asserts that migrants came to the Americas via Beringia, the land mass now covered by the ocean waters of the Bering Strait.Small lithic stage peoples followed megafauna like bison, mammoth (now extinct), and caribou, thus gaining the modern nickname "big-game hunters." Groups of people may also have traveled into North America on shelf or sheet ice along the northern Pacific coast.It is the oldest known civilization in the Americas and one of the five sites where civilization originated independently and indigenously in the ancient world, flourishing between the 30th and 18th centuries BC.It pre-dated the Mesoamerican Olmec civilization by nearly two millennia.