编辑“美国”（章节）

===欧洲殖民前===
{{Main article|人类史}} [[美洲]]的人类定居始于12，500至27，000年前，研究人员提出了各种不同的可能路线。最常见和被广泛接受的理论是，人类在30，000年前穿越西伯利亚和阿拉斯加之间的白令海峡<ref>{{Citation|author=David J. Meltzer|year=2009|title=First peoples in a New World: colonizing Ice Age America|page=329|quote=The port of entry for America’s ﬁrst peoples was the Bering Sea region. They could, and likely did, walk across from Siberia to Alaska when expanding continental ice sheets dropped sea levels worldwide and Beringia surfaced. Crossing its Mammoth Steppe, blanketed by parkland and grazed by mammoth, horse, and bison, was possible anytime between 27,000 and 10,000 years ago. The recent genetic evidence of a possible Beringian standstill suggests the ﬁrst peoples may have been relatively isolated in this region for much of that time.|publisher=University of California Press}}</ref><ref>{{Citation|author=Erika Tamm, et al|year=2007|title=Beringian Standstill and spread of Native American founders|title-url=https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0000829#pone.0000829-Pitulko1|quote=The new data suggest that the initial founders of the Americas emerged from a single source ancestral population that evolved in isolation, likely in Beringia. This scenario is consistent with the unique pattern of diversity from autosomal locus D9S1120 of a private allele in high frequency and ubiquitous in the Americas. The finding that humans were present at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site dated to 30,000 ybp suggests that the isolation in Beringia might have lasted up to 15,000 years. Following this isolation, the initial founders of the Americas began rapidly populating the New World from North to South America.|doi=10.1371/journal.pone.0000829}}</ref> 彼时海平面处于最低水平，大陆桥一直保持到至少125，000年前人类穿越白令海峡定居美洲。<ref>{{Citation|author=David J. Meltzer|year=2009|title=First peoples in a New World: colonizing Ice Age America|page=329|quote=In any case, it appears from the evidence at Monte Verde that the ﬁrst Americans were here by at least 12,500 BP and possibly earlier still. Certainly by 11,500 BP, Clovis Paleoindians were widespread, possibly representing a second migratory pulse to the New World, one that may have spread across the continent in less than a thousand years.|publisher=University of California Press}}</ref> 

基于线粒体DNA的遗传证据表明，中亚和北美原住民之间的共同祖先估计在25，000至20，000年前分化，<ref>{{Citation|author=Goebel, Waters & O’Rourke|year=2008|title=The Late Pleistocene dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas|quote=Establishing when central Asian and Native American haplogroup lineages last shared a common ancestor has proven to be difficult. Current coalescent estimates based on variation in extant mtDNA lineages set the event at 25 to 20 ka or less than 20 ka, after the last glacial maximum (LGM), and estimates based on Y- chromosome variability suggest that divergence occurred after 22.5 ka, possibly as late as 20 to 15 ka.|doi=10.1126/science.1153569}}</ref> 亚单倍群分析表明白令海峡地区的人类分化在160，000年前分化<ref>{{Citation|author=Goebel, Waters & O’Rourke|year=2008|title=The Late Pleistocene dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas.|doi=10.1126/science.1153569|quote=New analyses of haplogroup subclades help to resolve when modern humans subsequently spread from Beringia to the rest of the Americas. Three subclades of mtDNA subhaplogroup C1 are widely distributed among North, Central, and South Americans but absent in Asian populations, which suggests that they evolved after the central Asian–Native American split, as the first Americans were dispersing from Beringia. The estimated date of coalescence for these subclades is 16.6 to 11.2 ka, which suggests that the colonization of the Americas south of the continental ice sheets may have occurred some time during the late-glacial period, thousands of years after the initial splitting of Asian and Native American lineages.|page=}}</ref>

大约10，500年前，北美东部地区的人民发展了以玉米种植，驯养动物，狩猎，捕鱼和采集为基础的农业，<ref>{{Citation|author=Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz|year=2014|title=An indigenous peoples' history of the United States|page=15-16|quote=Domestication of plants took place around the globe in seven locales during approximately the same period, around 8500 BC. Three of the seven were in the Americas, all based on corn: the Valley of Mexico and Central America (Mesoamerica); the South-Central Andes in South America; and eastern North America. [...] During this time, many of the same human societies began domesticating animals. Only in the American continents was the parallel domestication of animals eschewed in favor of game management, a kind of animal husbandry different from that developed in Africa and Asia. In these seven areas, agriculture based "civilized" societies developed in symbiosis with hunting, fishing, and gathering peoples on their peripheries, gradually enveloping many of the latter into the realms of their civilizations, except for those in regions inhospitable to agriculture.|isbn=978-0-8070-0040-3|lg=http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D80C34C2EDEF56A1CA68F01727416207}}</ref> 其农业所需的复杂的灌溉系统随着中、南美洲的贸易得到发展<ref>{{Citation|author=Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz|year=2014|title=An indigenous peoples' history of the United States|page=16|isbn=978-0-8070-0040-3|lg=http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D80C34C2EDEF56A1CA68F01727416207|quote=Corn, being a summer crop, can tolerate no more than twenty to thirty days without water and even less time in high temperatures. Many of the areas where corn was the staple were arid or semiarid, so its cultivation required the design and construction of complex irrigation systems-in place at least two thousand years be fore Europeans knew the Americas existed. The proliferation of agriculture and cultigens could not have occurred without centuries of cultural and commercial interchange among the peoples of North, Central, and South America, whose traders carried seeds as well as other goods and cultural practices.}}</ref> 到十五世纪，美洲的人口达到一亿，其中北美拥有四千万人口。同一时期[[欧洲]]人口约为五千万。<ref>{{Citation|author=Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz|year=2014|title=An indigenous peoples' history of the United States|page=17|isbn=978-0-8070-0040-3|lg=http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D80C34C2EDEF56A1CA68F01727416207|quote=The total population of the hemisphere was about one hundred million at the end of the fifteenth century, with about two-fifths in North America, including Mexico. Central Mexico alone supported some thirty million people. At the same time, the population of Europe as far east as the Ural Mountains was around fifty million.}}</ref>

在欧洲殖民之初，大多数土著人民生活在农业社会，但也有是狩猎者和采集者。<ref name=":2">{{News citation|author=Dennis Etler|newspaper=[[CGTN]]|title=U.S. treatment of Native Americans is a gross human rights violation|date=2021-03-29|url=https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-03-26/U-S-treatment-of-Native-Americans-is-a-gross-human-rights-violation-YVtGCFbCJa/index.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220219235353/https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-03-26/U-S-treatment-of-Native-Americans-is-a-gross-human-rights-violation-YVtGCFbCJa/index.html|archive-date=2022-02-19|retrieved=2022-07-01}}</ref>