"Phorusrhacids, colloquially known as terror birds, are an extinct clade of large carnivorousflightless birds that were the largest species of apex predators in South America during the Cenozoic era; their conventionally accepted temporal range covers from 62 to 1.8 million years ago." Source: Wikipedia.
Terror birds spread into North America around 2.7 million years ago after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama connected the two continents, leading to a cross-migration of flora and fauna known as the Great American Interchange.
It's possible that early humans coexisted with descendants of these monsters in South America. According to Wikipedia, "...reports from Uruguay of new findings of relatively small forms [of terror birds] dating to 18,000 and 96,000 years ago would imply that phorusrhacids survived there until very recently (i.e., until the late Pleistocene); the initial report of such a recent date has been questioned."
"Evidence from the Cooper's Ferry archaeological site in Western Idaho shows that people lived in the Columbia River Basin around 16,000 years ago. That's well before a corridor between ice sheets opened up, clearing an inland route south from the Bering land bridge. That suggests that people migrated south along the Pacific coast. Stone tools from the site suggest a possible connection between these first Americans and Northeast Asian hunter-gatherers from the same period." Source: Ars Technica.
It's pretty clear now that the first Americans arrived by boat. The evidence shows that these prehistoric hunter-gatherers traveled down the western coast, establishing camps and settlements and eventually reaching South America long before the Beringia land route emerged near the end of the last ice age.
Video from 2017.
The Clovis-first theory is effectively dead. According to Ars Technica, "At this point, there's not really much debate about whether people had arrived in the Americas before the rise of the Clovis culture, the collection of tools and weapons once thought to represent the oldest human activity in the Americas. Clovis appears starting around 13,250 years ago, so some groups were clearly present earlier. Most of the debate now is focused on the route these earlier people took to reach the thawed, habitable parts of North America."
Video posted 2018. I'm not sure how old the documentary is.
"The practice of human sacrifice in America’s largest prehistoric city was more subtle and complex than experts once thought, new research suggests." Source: Western Digs (2015).
"Recent studies into the remains of sacrificial victims at the ancient city of Cahokia reveal that those who were killed were not captives taken from outlying regions, as many archaeologists had believed.
"Instead, they may have been residents of the same community that killed them."
Report from 2014. Evidence of human sacrifice discussed at around 6:25.
Note: "Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, which developed advanced societies across much of what is now the central and southeastern United States, beginning more than 1,000 years before European contact. Today, Cahokia Mounds is considered the largest and most complex archaeological site north of the great pre-Columbian cities in Mexico. It may have briefly exceeded contemporaneous London in population." (Wikipedia)
Note: "Aztalan is the site of an ancient Mississippian culture settlement that flourished during the 10th to 13th centuries. The indigenous people constructed massive earthwork mounds for religious and political purposes. They were part of a widespread culture with important settlements throughout the Mississippi River valley and its tributaries. Their trading network extended from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast, and into the southeast of the present-day United States." Source: Wikipedia.
Bison kill site near Elk City, Oklahoma. Video from 2011.
"Between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500 American Indian hunters killed hundreds of bison in a canyon near present Elk City, Oklahoma. During the 1990s the site became a focus of a major research project by the Oklahoma Archeological Survey at the University of Oklahoma. The people who made the kills were part of the Late Archaic (circa 2500 B.C. to A.D.1) groups that survived through hunting and gathering and did not practice horticulture. The site is in a large canyon, one of the deepest of many in the area. The canyon has a number of side branches, some of which are flushed nearly clean of fill. Others are still largely filled with sediments and are visually undetectable on the surface. These deposit remnants contain bone beds and other evidence of bison kills and butchering." Source: Oklahoma Historical Society.
Hudson-Meng bison kill site in Nebraska.(2017)
"Bill Hudson and Albert Meng were local [Nebraska] ranchers who are credited with discovering the bonebed in 1954 while digging for a pond. Originally excavated by Dr. Larry Agenbroad in the 1970s, the dig was over 400 square meters and was considered the largest Alberta Culture [1]bison kill site ever discovered. The bison found are not the same species as the bison that currently live in the United States (Bison bison), but are an animal transitional in evolution between the extinct Bison antiquus and the modern species." (Wikipedia)
[1] I might be wrong about this, but I think "Alberta Culture" refers to an Archaic Period paleo-indian culture which was located in the general area of Alberta, Canada and the northern Great Plains in the US.
Note: "For approximately 6,000 years, between about 8,000 and 2,000 years ago, the Archaic period in the Great Plains was a time of human adjustment to changing ecological conditions. Paleo-Indian bison hunting decreased markedly after about 9,000 years ago, due to a steady deterioration of ecological conditions. Subsequently there were several late Paleo- Indian groups ... which were beginning to shift toward the use of small animal and plant resources. By about 8,000 years ago, both bison and human populations in the Great Plains had decreased significantly. Some groups may have moved into the foothills and mountains to the west and others into the prairies on the east. The Plains was not abandoned during the Archaic period, but ecological conditions made it a much less desirable place." (Encyclopedia of the Great Plains)
"From hallucinogenic mushrooms and cacti to alcohol-infused enemas and psychoactive dried toad skins, the array of consciousness-altering substances that people in the early Americas used was wider than thought, a new report suggests." Source: Live Science.(2014)
Note: "At least 54 hallucinogenic mushrooms in the genus Psilocybe were used by pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, and those mushroom species can still be found today in Mexico, according to the report. Psilocybin is the hallucinogenic compound in these mushrooms that produces mind-altering effects."
"Archaeologists have unearthed long-lost art from a civilization that once inhabited the Caribbean." Source: IFLScience (2017).
"Known as the Tainos, these people once lived on the island of Mona, Puerto Rico – now an uninhabited nature reserve – in the 14th century, before the arrival of Columbus. Now gone, thousands of pieces of Taino art have since been found in caves on the island, offering a fascinating glimpse into their culture."
Note: "Mona Island is believed to have been originally settled by the Taíno. An archeological excavation during the 1980s discovered many Pre-Columbian objects on the island that helped support historians' theories of the island's first inhabitants. Stone tools found in a rock shelter have been dated to around 3000 BC. Much later the island was settled by the Taínos and remained so until the arrival of the Spanish in the 15th century." (Wikipedia)
This Wikipedia entry is kind of confusing. It makes it sound like the Taino and Tainos were two different tribes. I'm guessing, though, that there were two different waves of migration by the same group of people. The Taino are thought to have come from South America -- the Amazon basin, perhaps, or the Columbian Andes.
"Researchers have long thought that snail and clam shells found at Caribbean archaeological sites were evidence of 'starvation food' eaten in times when other resources were lacking. Now, a study suggests these shells may be evidence of children helping with the grocery shopping -- AD 400 style." Source: Science Daily.
Note: "The oldest evidence of human settlement in the Caribbean has been found at Ortoiroid sites on Trinidad dating to the mid-6th millennium BC. They had reached Hispaniola and Cuba by the mid-5th millennium BCE, where their society is also known as the Casirimoid. The hunter-gatherer Guanahatabey present in western Cuba at the time of Columbus's arrival may have represented a continuation of their culture or more recent arrivals from southern Florida or the Yucatan." (Wikipedia)
"In a landscape known for its history of prodigious bison hunting, researchers have uncovered traces of a unique aspect of native hunting tradition — a camp dedicated to making the dried meat-and-fat product known as pemmican." Source: Western Digs (2017)
"The camp is just part of a large bison-hunting site in north-central Montana called Kutoyis, which includes more than 3,500 stone features dating from to the 14th to 17th centuries, a heyday for bison hunting among the ancestors of the modern Blackfoot peoples."
Comment: Pemmican was invented by the Metis tribe in Canada, according to various sources I've seen (I'm not sure how that was determined). The Metis trace their descent to the First Nations peoples, so it's possible that the paleo-indians learned how to make pemmican when they first encountered the bison in the New World. This is all pure speculation, though.
According to The Bradshaw Foundation, "The Coso petroglyphs consist of rock carvings depicting animals, abstract symbols and anthropomorphic figures ... The petroglyphs were created by pecking, grinding, or scratching into a rock's surface. They have been dated between 10,000 and 1,000 years old, based on associated archaeological evidence such as the remains of dwellings, hearths, or flaked stone artifacts such as obsidian arrowheads."
"No one knows for sure who decorated Little Petroglyph Canyon with images out of a dreamscape, some thought to be more than 10,000 years old. Or why the basalt walls of a narrow wash in the bone-dry Coso Mountains at the northern edge of the Mojave Desert became a magic canvas for flocks of bighorn sheep, hunters with bows and arrows poised and more. But the area is probably the richest Amerindian Petroglyph / rock-art site in the Western hemisphere." (Wikipedia).
