The Atlantic World, a pentagonal region encompassing one twelfth of the Earth, includes the Azores, Madeira, northwestern Europe (including western Denmark and western Norway), the British Isles, the Orkney Islands, the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, eastern and central North America, the northern section of Hispaniola, and several smaller island groups, notably Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos.

The eastern boundary, marked at 10° east longitude, divides Scandinavia into Eastern and Western sections, with Western Scandinavia oriented toward the North Atlantic and Eastern Scandinavia centered on the Baltic Sea Basin. This boundary also aligns with the historical eastern border of West Germany (1949–1990), before terminating in south-central Germany at its junction with the neighboring region to the southeast.

The western boundary, at 110° west longitude, cuts through Canada, separating the northern districts of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories from Alberta and Saskatchewan, approximately 75 miles south of the Alberta-Saskatchewan-Montana junction (48.1896851°N)—the northernmost point of the neighboring world to the southwest.

The southwestern boundary follows the division between the upper and lower Mississippi River Basin, then extends eastward into the Atlantic Ocean just south of Jacksonville, Florida, before terminating in northwestern Hispaniola.

HistoryAtlas contains 18,139 entries for The Atlantic World from the Paleolithic period to 1899.

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Northern Oceania encompasses Northeast Asia, North Polynesia, and Northwestern North America.

Its southeastern boundary extends from 48.1896851°N, approximately 75 miles south of the Alberta-Saskatchewan-Montana junction, to the Pacific Ocean at Cape Mendocino. To the immediate northwest of this line lies the Pacific Northwest.

In Canada, Alberta and British Columbia form the border with the United States, while to the north lie Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Alaska.

The eastern boundary at 110°W was originally designated as the Fourth Meridian of the Dominion Land Survey. However, due to the limitations of early surveying techniques, the meridian was placed slightly west of this longitude. Since 1905, the Fourth Meridian has served as the entire boundary between Alberta and Saskatchewan and continues northward as the dividing line between Nunavut and the Northwest Territories above 70°N.

Northern Oceania's western boundary, at 130°E, roughly aligns with the division between Siberia and the Russian Far East, corresponding to Russia’s Siberian and Far Eastern federal districts. This boundary terminates above the Amur River, which has historically marked the border between Russia and China’s Heilongjiang province. The northernmost point of China, in Mohe City, lies along this river.

The southwestern boundary separates most of Japan’s northernmost major island, Hokkaido, from Honshu and the rest of the Japanese archipelago.

HistoryAtlas contains 401 entries for Northern Oceania from the Paleolithic period to 1899.

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The Far West, encompassing the southwestern section of the North American continent along with the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific Ocean, includes the Galápagos Islands, the five countries of Central America, Mexico, and the Gulf and Western United States, as well as Cuba, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and the northwestern and southwestern regions of Haiti on Hispaniola.

Within the United States, the following states are entirely within The Far West:
Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Nevada.

Portions of other states also belong to this world, including:

• Southwestern Georgia
• Most of Alabama
• Southeastern Tennessee
• Southeastern Missouri
• Southwestern South Dakota
• Most of Montana, except its northeastern and northwestern corners
• Southern Idaho
• Southeastern Oregon

HistoryAtlas contains 3707 entries for The Far West from the Paleolithic period to 1899.

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Around 55,000 years ago, global weather patterns begin to fluctuate dramatically, shifting from extreme cold to milder conditions and back within just a few decades.

By 50,000 years ago, the Wisconsin glaciation (known in Europe as the Würm glaciation) is well advanced. Expanding ice sheets in North America and Europe push climatic zones southward, transforming the temperate regions of Europe and North America into Arctic tundra-like landscapes. Meanwhile, rain bands typical of temperate zones shift south, reaching as far as northern Africa.

Neanderthals and Climate Adaptation

The Neanderthals, well adapted to cold climates with their barrel chests and stocky limbs, are better suited than Cro-Magnons to retain body heat. However, the rapid and unpredictable climate fluctuations cause ecological upheavals, replacing familiar plants and animals within a single lifetime—a shift to which Neanderthals struggle to adapt.

One major challenge is the replacement of forests by grasslands during the Mousterian Pluvial, an effect of the last Ice Age’s climatic shifts. This change disrupts the Neanderthals’ ambush-based hunting techniques, making it harder for them to secure food. As a result, large numbers of Neanderthals likely perish due to food scarcity and environmental stress, with the crisis peaking around 30,000 years ago.

Neanderthal Burial and Final Strongholds

Despite their decline, Neanderthals appear to be the first humans to intentionally bury their dead, often in simple graves. The last known traces of Mousterian culture, though lacking human remains, have been discovered at Gorham’s Cave on Gibraltar’s remote south-facing coast, dating between 30,000 and 24,500 years ago.

Possible Scenarios for Neanderthal Extinction

Several hypotheses attempt to explain the disappearance of the Neanderthals from the fossil record around 25,000 years ago:

1. Complete Extinction and Replacement: Neanderthals were a separate species from modern humans and became extinct due to climate change and/or competition with Homo sapiens, who expanded into their territories starting around 80,000 years ago. Anthropologist Jared Diamond suggests that violent conflict and displacement played a role in their demise.

2. Interbreeding and Absorption: Neanderthals were a contemporary subspecies that interbred with modern humans, gradually disappearing through genetic absorption.

3. Volcanic Catastrophe: A Campanian Ignimbrite super-eruption around 40,000 years ago, followed by a second eruption a few thousand years later, may have severely impacted Neanderthal populations. Evidence from Mezmaiskaya Cave in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia supports this theory, with mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis showing a distinct Neanderthal lineage separate from modern humans.

Energy Needs and Survival Challenges

Neanderthals had higher caloric requirements than any other known human species. They required 100 to 350 more calories per day than an anatomically modern human male (68.5 kg) or female (59.2 kg). This higher energy demand may have made them especially vulnerable when food sources became scarce, further contributing to their extinction.

Ultimately, by 25,000 years ago, Neanderthals disappear from the fossil record, leaving behind traces of their culture—but no direct descendants in the modern human genetic lineage.

Northern North America (49,293 – 28,578 BCE): Upper Pleistocene I — Ice Margins, Continental Gateways, and the First Migrations

Geographic and Environmental Context

During the late Pleistocene, Northern North America stretched across a landscape undergoing immense geological transformation. The advance and retreat of the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets shaped a continent of alternating refugia and barriers. The region’s three great subregions—Northwestern, Northeastern, and Gulf & Western North America—each represented a distinctive interface between ice, land, and sea.

• Northwestern North America bridged Asia and the Americas through the vast, exposed Beringian landmass. Grassy steppes, braided rivers, and polynyas along the Bering and Chukchi shelves linked Siberia to Alaska.
  South of the continental ice, the Yukon and Kuskokwim basins opened to interior plains and the Gulf of Alaska’s wide glacial fjords.

• Northeastern North America was dominated by the Laurentide ice complex and its proglacial lakes—ancestral Iroquois, Algonquin, and Champlain basins—framed by newly deglaciated river valleys.
  The Great Lakes corridor, the St. Lawrence–Hudson axis, and emerging Atlantic forelands formed the core of early post-glacial forager landscapes.

• Gulf & Western North America stretched from the Gulf Coast and Southern Plains across the deserts and canyons of the Southwest to the California littoral and Channel Islands.
  Its mosaic of pluvial lakes, estuaries, and upwelling-rich coasts provided a warm-water counterpoint to the glacial north.

Together these zones composed a continental hinge between Ice-Age Eurasia and the Americas—each subregion a stage in the story of human dispersal and adaptation to the extremes of a changing world.

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Climate and Environmental Shifts

The period encompassed the height of the Last Glacial Maximum. Yet regional variation produced a continent of contrasts:

• In the Northwest, severe cold and aridity dominated inland Beringia, though coastal polynyas and summer grasslands offered productivity.

• In the Northeast, alternating Dansgaard–Oeschger warm pulses and Heinrich cold snaps drove cycles of ice advance and retreat, spawning huge meltwater floods and loess plains.

• In the Gulf & Western corridor, cooler but relatively stable climates supported pluvial lake systems and broad river valleys; along California’s margin, coastal upwelling made the Pacific rim one of the richest marine environments on Earth.

Low sea levels united Alaska and Siberia, widened the Pacific and Gulf shelves, and created continental interiors laced with temporary lakes, dunes, and glacial outwash plains—landscapes of constant flux but enduring opportunity.

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Lifeways and Settlement Patterns

Northern North America during this interval was a frontier of mobility—a patchwork of exploratory movements, seasonal circuits, and, by the end of the epoch, enduring forager traditions.

• In the Northwest, big-game hunters pursued mammoth, bison, and horse across the Beringian grasslands. Seasonal camps clustered at river confluences and bluff edges, while coastal groups ventured onto land-fast ice and ice-edge polynyas for seals and seabirds.
  These were small, mobile bands accustomed to long circuits between steppe and shore.

• In the Northeast, later arrivals followed the retreating ice margins into proglacial valleys. Fluted-point traditions reveal expert hunters tracking caribou, elk, and deer across freshly deglaciated terrain.
  Camps on river terraces and kame plains served as transient bases for butchery and tool repair rather than long-term villages.

• In the Gulf & Western regions, climatic moderation and ecological diversity allowed sustained occupation. Coastal foragers exploited shellfish, fish, and marine mammals along the expanded California and Gulf shelves, while interior hunters roamed canyonlands and pluvial basins in pursuit of camelids, horses, and later deer and pronghorn.
  Rockshelters and spring-fed oases formed the nuclei of repeated seasonal use.

Across all three subregions, subsistence strategies balanced large-game hunting, aquatic foraging, and strategic mobility—the adaptive triad that defined Ice-Age resilience.

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Technology and Material Culture

From Beringia to the Gulf, technology reflected shared Upper Paleolithic roots tempered by local innovation.

• Northwestern assemblages featured blade and microblade industries in high-quality chert and obsidian, with inset composite points, burins, and sewing needles for tailored skins.

• Northeastern traditions emphasized fluted projectile points, prismatic blades, and scrapers crafted from long-distance lithic sources, signaling wide-ranging exchange and expertise in stone selection.

• Gulf & Western toolkits relied on flake–blade technology, early hafting, fire use, and pigment processing, suited to mixed desert, canyon, and littoral ecologies.

Throughout the region, ochre pigments and personal ornaments (drilled teeth, shells, beads) reveal symbolic continuity with the larger circumpolar Upper Paleolithic world.

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Movement and Interaction Corridors

Northern North America’s human geography was defined by corridors of ice, water, and stone:

• The Beringian steppe and the Yukon–Mackenzie trench formed the first continental highway, linking Siberia to interior North America.

• The ice-free Pacific coast—the embryonic “kelp highway”—offered a maritime alternative, dotted with refugia along Alaska’s and British Columbia’s fjorded shores.

• As deglaciation advanced, the St. Lawrence, Great Lakes, and Mississippi basins became arteries of migration and trade.

• Farther south, the Rio Grande–Gila–Colorado network and the Gulf estuaries tied the interior to marine resources.

Through these routes, populations spread, merged, and diverged, laying the demographic foundations of later Holocene cultural provinces.

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Cultural and Symbolic Expressions

Symbolic life across Northern North America echoed Eurasian antecedents yet developed distinctive local signatures.
Ochre-stained hearths, portable ornaments, and structured camp layouts indicate social memory and ritual behavior.
In both Beringia and the Great Lakes heartland, burials with pigment and grave goods suggest shared beliefs in ancestral continuity.
These expressions, modest in scale yet rich in meaning, anchored social cohesion in landscapes that demanded both cooperation and constant movement.

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Environmental Adaptation and Resilience

Resilience was achieved through mobility, diversification, and knowledge of seasonality:

• Layered clothing, snow shelters, and fire technology extended human presence deep into subarctic zones.

• In milder belts, foragers exploited estuaries, riverine wetlands, and pluvial lakes, moving along altitudinal and hydrological gradients.

• Coastal populations learned to synchronize with marine cycles; interior hunters tracked herd migrations across vast steppes.

This adaptive plasticity allowed human groups to colonize environments ranging from glacial fjords to desert basins—a testament to the flexibility that made the Americas habitable at the height of global cold.

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Transition Toward the Last Glacial Maximum

By 28,578 BCE, Northern North America stood at the threshold of transformation.
Ice sheets approached their greatest extent, closing interior corridors but leaving narrow coastal and riverine refuges.
Populations in Beringia maintained a tenuous bridge between continents, while others expanded southward along the Pacific and Gulf margins into unglaciated refugia.
The region thus embodied the Twelve Worlds principle: a set of distinct yet interdependent subregions—each self-contained, each connected through migration, exchange, and shared adaptation—that together forged the human foothold on a glacial continent.

Northwestern North America (49,293 – 28,578 BCE) Upper Paleolithic I — Beringian Grasslands, Ice-Edge Shores, and First Entrants

Geographic and Environmental Context

Northwestern North America includes Alaska, western Canada (Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon and Northwest territory and Nunavut west of 110°W) Alaska, Washington State, northern Idaho, and the northwestern portions of Montana, Oregon, and California.

Anchors: the Bering Strait & Seward Peninsula, Brooks Range & North Slope, Yukon–Kuskokwim and Copper–Cook Inlet basins, the Gulf of Alaska & Aleutians, the Inside Passage/Haida Gwaii and outer coast of British Columbia, the Stikine–Skeena–Fraser–Columbia plateaus and canyons, Puget Sound, and the Klamath–Redwood coast of NW California.

• Exposed Beringia knitted Siberia to Alaska under low sea levels; broad coastal shelves flanked the Gulf of Alaska.

• Inland, open steppe–tundra spread south of continental ice; river corridors (early Yukon, Kuskokwim) laced the landscape.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

• Peak Last Glacial conditions: cold, dry, windy; sea ice season long on the northern shelf; polynyas sustained rich marine life along the Bering and Chukchi margins.

Subsistence & Settlement

• Big-game foraging focused on mammoth, bison, horse, and caribou on river terraces and upland saddles.

• Ice-edge foraging used landfast ice for seal and sea-bird harvests where accessible.

• Small, mobile camps recur at bluff edges and confluences; hearths, knapping floors, and butchery areas typical.

Technology & Material Culture

• Blade–microblade traditions from high-quality chert and obsidian; inset composite points, scrapers, burins.

• Bone/antler points and awls; sewn skin garments (needles) for deep cold.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

• Seward Peninsula ⇄ Interior Yukon ridgeways; Kuskokwim–Copper cross-drainages; coastal “kelp highway” reconnaissance along the Gulf of Alaska during ice-free months.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

• Ochre-stained features; portable ornaments (drilled teeth, shell) reflect Upper Paleolithic symbolic commonalities across the north.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

• High mobility and broad prey portfolios buffered risk; cold-weather tailoring and snow shelters extended wintering range.

Transition

On the eve of deglaciation, foragers had mapped river and shelf ecologies that would guide later migrations as ice sheets retreated.

Northeastern North America (49,293–28,578 BCE) Upper Pleistocene I — Paleoindian Arrival, Fluted Horizons, and River Terraces

Geographic and Environmental Context

Northeastern North America includes the Atlantic coast from Jacksonville, FL to St. John’s, NL; Greenland; the Canadian Arctic; all Canadian provinces east to the Saskatchewan–Alberta border; and, within the U.S., the Old South, the Appalachian Plateau, Midwest & Great Lakes (including Driftless Area, Midwest Lowlands, Tallgrass Prairie, Big Woods, Drift Prairie, Aspen Parkland).

Anchors: Chesapeake–Delaware–Hudson–Gulf of Maine coasts; St. Lawrence–Quebec–Montreal; Great Lakes & Ohio–Illinois–Mississippi valleys; Appalachian Plateau (Pittsburgh–Knoxville); Hudson Bay rim; Arctic (Baffin, Foxe, Labrador); Greenland (future Norse Eastern/Western Settlements).

• Laurentide ice lobes retreated unevenly; proglacial Lake Iroquois/Algonquin ancestors formed; coastal outwash plains expanded.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

• Cold, dry; abrupt Dansgaard–Oeschger oscillations; productive river–lake ecotones as ice withdrew.

Subsistence & Settlement

• Paleoindian big-game foragers (fluted points) hunted mammoth/mastodon (earlier), caribou, then elk/deer; camps on terraces and kame plains.

Technology & Material Culture

• Clovis–Folsom-like fluted points → regional fluted series; prismatic blades, end-scrapers; bone/antler tools.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

• Champlain–Hudson, St. Lawrence, Ohio–Tennessee, Great Lakes strandlines; Atlantic forelands.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

• Red-ochre treatment; curated toolkits; long-distance raw material transport (cherts, obsidian rare).

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

• High mobility across deglaciating mosaics buffered risk.

Transition
By 28,578 BCE, mobile foragers had mapped post-glacial corridors.

Gulf and Western North America (49,293 – 28,578 BCE): Upper Pleistocene I — Ice Age Coastlines, Desert Basins, and Canyon Shelters

Geographic and Environmental Context

Gulf and Western North America includes Mississippi–Lower Mississippi, Gulf Coast Plains (FL Panhandle, AL–MS–LA–TX), Southern Plains (TX–OK–KS), Southwest deserts/plateaus (NM–AZ), Rocky Mountain fringes (CO–WY south), Great Basin (UT–NV), and nearly all California (except far NW).

Anchors: Lower Mississippi & Yazoo–Natchezbluffs; Mobile–Pensacola–Calusa estuaries; Edwards Plateau–Pecos; Chihuahuan–Sonoran drainages (Gila–Salt–Rio Grande); Colorado Plateau canyons; Great Basin playas; Sacramento–San Joaquin delta; Channel Islands & Chumash coast.

• Sea level ~100 m lower expanded Gulf/California shelves; Great Basin larger pluvial lakes (Bonneville/Lahontan ancestors); Southwest cooler/drier; California coasts broad.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

• LGM cold, arid interiors; pluvial pulses in basins; productive upwelling along California.

Subsistence & Settlement

• Early people likely present by later in this span:

  • Coastal: shellfish, pinnipeds, fish; kelp beds (California, Gulf estuaries).

  • Interior: camelid, horse (early), later deer/pronghorn; small game; seed geophytes.

  • Canyon/rockshelter residence in Colorado Plateau, Edwards Plateau.

Technology & Material Culture

• Flake–blade industries; early hafting; fire use; ochre pigments.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

• Gulf estuaries, Lower Mississippi river-terraces; Rio Grande–Gila–Salt; coastal highway along California.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

• Hearth structuring; pigment use; early engraved stones in some regions.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

• Coast–canyon–lake mobility hedged climate extremes.

Transition

• Deglaciation will enlarge estuaries, stabilize river plains, and build Holocene fisheries.

An asteroid strikes northern Arizona, the impact releasing energy equivalent to three-and-a-half million tons of TNT.

Probably one hundred feet (thirty meters) in diameter, weighing sixty-three thousand metric tons and traveling five to ten miles per second (eight to sixteen kilometers per second), most of the object vaporizes, but blasts out a bowl-shaped depression six hundred feet (one hundred and eighty meters) deep and 0.72 miles (1.2 kilometers) in diameter, surrounded by a rim one hundred and sixty feet (fifty meters) high.

Barringer Meteor Crater, as the impact site is called, is named for American engineer Daniel M. Barringer, who will theorize in 1905 that the crater was meteoric in origin.

At least three species of human live in Southern Siberia around 40,000 years before the present: Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, and the Denisovans (identified as a separate species in 2010 through DNA evidence.).

Siberia has paleontological significance, as it contains bodies of prehistoric animals from the Pleistocene Epoch, preserved in ice or in permafrost.

Specimens of Goldfuss cave lion cubs, Yuka the mammoth and another woolly mammoth from Oymyakon, a woolly rhinoceros from the Kolyma, and bison and horses from Yukagir have been found.

One of the largest-known volcanic events of the last 251 million years of Earth's geological history formed the Siberian Traps.

Volcanic activity continued here for a million years and some scientists consider it a possible cause of the "Great Dying" about 250 million years ago, estimated to have killed 90% of species existing at the time.