Within a couple thousand years, North America had lost all its mammoths, mastodons, giant ground-sloths, tapirs, camels, llamas, glyptodonts, giant beavers and other large species. These people hunted mammoths, mastodons and other large mammals - likely causing their extinction. Not long after humans made it to North America, they developed the Clovis culture, known for its distinctive stone spear points up to eight inches long with fluted bases. Previously, the flora and fauna of North America had an evolutionary and ecological history completely apart from the influence of humans. A thousand or so years later, nearly one third of the habitable world in the Americas had been discovered and populated by these first Americans. North and South America are the New World not only because Columbus blundered into them, making them new for western civilization in the 1400s, but because people from eastern Siberia wandered there about 14,500 years earlier and made them new for all of humankind. Intelligent life forms have finally arrived on your side of the world, and your future suddenly looks a lot brighter.
Then, around 15,000 years ago, up in the far northwestern corner of North America, small bands of humans dressed in the furs of their prey slowly make their way across Beringia and into Alaska before the rising seas drown the ice age land bridge behind them. You amuse yourself by watching the forests of North America migrate and change composition in a dance with the advancing and retreating glaciers, but you curse the luck that gave you the uninhabited side of Earth to observe. While lots of interesting things are recorded by your antipodal partner, you are forced to repeat the same observation for the next 185,000 years. After meticulous observations, you must report, “No sign of intelligent life,” from your side of the world. You have a partner in stationary orbit on the opposite side of the world, who soon discovers two-legged animals that make stone tools and control fire. At a glance, you can see all of North and South America, half the Pacific Ocean, much of the western Atlantic and a sliver of Antarctica. Your lifespan is in the millions of years, so you are quite patient and park yourself in a stationary orbit above the equator a few hundred miles west of the Galapagos Islands. Imagine you are an alien from outer space, intelligent of course, who came to observe Earth and its less intelligent life forms around 200,000 years BP (before present).
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