When the last glaciers receded about 10,000 years ago , ancestors of the Native Americans filled nearly all of the habitable parts of North and South America. They lived in isolation from the history-and particularly from the diseases-of what became known as the Old World. The Native Americans who greeted the first Europeans had become diverse peoples. They spoke between 300 and 350 distinct languages, and their societies and ways of living varied tremendously. The Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru built great empires . In what is now the United States, the Mississippians built cities surrounded by farmland between present-day St. Louis, Missouri,and Natchez, Mississippi. The Mississippians' Great Sun king ruled authoritatively and was carried from place to place by servants, preceded by flute-players.
The Pueblo peoples of the Southwest lived in large towns, irrigated their dry land with river water, and traded with peoples as far away as Mexico and California. In the East, the peoples who eventually encountered English settlers were varied, but they lived in similar ways. All of them grew much of their food. Women farmed and gathered food in the woods. Men hunted, fished, and made war. None of these peoples kept herds of domestic animals; they relied on abundant wild game for protein. All lived in family groups, but owed their principal loyalties to a wider network of kin and to their clans. Some-the Iroquois in upstate New York and the Powhatan confederacy in Virginia-formed alliances called confederacies for the purposes of keeping peace among neighbors and making war on outsiders. Even within these confederacies, however, everyday political organization seldom extended beyond villages, and village chiefs ruled their independent-minded people by consent. West Africa in 1580 In Central and West Africa, the great inland kingdoms of Mali and Ghana were influenced by Islam, and these kingdoms had traded with the Muslim world for hundreds of years. From the beginning, slaves were among the articles of trade. These earliest enslaved Africans were criminals, war captives, and people sold by their relatives to settle debts. New World demand increased the slave trade and changed it. Some of the coastal kingdoms of present-day Togo and Benin entered the trade as middlemen.
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