Palaeolithic Hunters
(20,000 - 10,000 B.C.)

For the greater part of the past 100,000 years, most of Canada lay buried beneath the continental glaciers of the last Ice Age. The largest unglaciated area was in the western Arctic, extending westward from the Mackenzie Delta region. This was the eastern edge of a large unglaciated area that stretched across the northern Yukon, Alaska and Siberia. Some 1,000 kilometres wide, the uncovered area joined Alaska and Siberia. Across this land bridge moved the inhabitants of the Ice Age tundras: caribou, horse, mammoth and the Palaeolithic Siberian hunters who pursued them. These people reached the northern Yukon at least 20,000 years ago.

Although there is no certain evidence, we suspect that the descendants of these first immigrants remained in far northwestern Canada throughout the last part of the Ice Age. They were probably ancestors of the people whose tools are found in local caves and dated to approximately 11,000 B.C. Around that time, some of these people probably moved southward and became the ancestors of the American Indians.