lasted understanding religious convincing history destruction

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COMBINED, NORTH AMERICA and South America cover an area of
16,000,000 square miles, more than a quarter of the land surface
of the globe. To its first human inhabitants, tens of thousands of
years ago, this enormous domain they had discovered was literally a world
unto itself: a world of miles-high mountains and vast fertile prairies, of
desert shrublands and dense tropical rain forests, of frigid arctic tundra
and hot murky swamps, of deep and fecund river valleys, of sparklingwater
lakes, of canopied woodlands, of savannahs and steppes-and thousands
upon thousands of miles of magnificent ocean coast. There were
places where it almost never rained, and places where it virtually never
stopped; there were places where the temperature reached 130 degrees
Fahrenheit, and places where it dropped to 80 degrees below zero. But in
all these places, under all these conditions, eventually some native people
made their homes.
By the time ancient Greece was falling under the control of Rome, in
North America the Adena Culture already had been flourishing for a thousand
years. As many as 500 Adena living sites have been uncovered by
modern archaeologists. Centered in present-day Ohio, they radiate out as
far as Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West
Virginia. We will never know how many hundreds more such sites are
buried beneath the modern cities and suburbs of the northeastern United
States, but we do know that these early sedentary peoples lived in towns
with houses that were circular in design and that ranged from single-family
dwellings as small as twenty feet in diameter to multi-family units up to
eighty feet across. These residences commonly were built in close proximity
to large public enclosures of 300 feet and more in diameter that mod-