Human Timeline

Human Timeline. . About 10,000 B.C., as the Wisconsin glacier retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, the first humans came into this region. These nomadic hunters pursued mammoths and other large mammals. Now known as Paleoindians, their spears were tipped with fluted stone points., They were replaced about 5500 B.C. by Archaic hunter-gatherers whose way of life focused on hunting smaller game and harvesting wild plants. About 2000 years ago, Woodland peoples moved here, introducing pottery, earth lodge villages, burial mounds, and the bow and arrow., Plains Village groups were the next to arrive. They cultivated large gardens and built sizable permanent communities. In 1000 A.D. ancestors of the Missouri River Mandan lived in a fortified village near Brandon; and in the 1500s, a large Oneota settlement spanned the Big Sioux River at Blood Run., By the mid-1700s, the Sioux, a nomadic Plains group, displaced the less militant permanent villagers. Lastly, Sioux Falls City was founded by Euroamerican settlers who arrived in 1856.