The first states formed by Native Americans not knowing they were embarking on the colonization of a new continent. The Bering land bridge had once connected North America and Siberia. It is now under water but it was once a vast area of dry land, several hundred miles wide. The original settlers came from Northeast Asia. Over the generations, they moved gradually eastward as they spread their camps and followed their prey. Although ice sheets covered most of what is now Canada, colonization gradually penetrated the heartland of what is now the United States. The kinds of societies that evolved into states were the Clovis tradition. On North America’s grasslands, early American Indians, hunted horses, camels, bison, elephants, mammoths, and giant sloths. The Clovis tradition flourished, in the Central Plains, on their western margins, and in what is now the eastern United States. Non-Clovis tools and butchered mammoth remains have been found at sites in Wisconsin. The various early colonists came at different times, perhaps by different routes, and had different physiques and genetic markers, which continue to be discovered and debated. The factors that played important roles in the rise of the first states were the effect of continental glaciation, the Bering land bridge that once connected North America and Siberia, colonists who viewed the “new world’, and early bands. Michael Waters and Thomas Stafford concluded that the Clovis tradition lasted no more that 450 years.
