The Applied History Research Group Transporting a ceremonial bag and tipi cover of a Blackfoot military society. Military societies had various important functions, including regulating life in the camp and on the march. Photo from Public Archives Canada. Photo by E.S. Curtis A Snow Hare

Scholars differ widely on the date humans first arrived in North America, but most archaeologists agree that the first homo sapiens arrived on the continent between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago. Most scholars agree that these people came on foot from Asia across an expanse of land that joined the two continents during the geological epoch known as the Pleistocene Era (which began 1.6 million years ago and ended 10,000 years ago). At this time, the Northern Hemisphere was experiencing an ice age during which massive glaciers locked up much of the world's moisture and ocean levels were as much as 100 meters lower than they are today. At least twice during the Pleistocene, glaciers froze enough of the oceans' water to expose the land between Asia and North America, each time creating a temporary land bridge known as Beringia where today the waters of the Bering Strait separate Siberia and Alaska. Bands of migratory hunters from northeastern Asia, known as Paleo-Siberians or Paleo-Indians, likely followed herds of big game such as woolly mammoths, mastodons, bison, and caribou across this arid 1,500 km-wide expanse of tundra onto the North American continent. The oldest known archaeological evidence of people living in what is now southern Alberta comes from a campsite overlooking the Vermilion Lakes near Banff. A small band of people stopped here some 11,700 years ago. They hunted Ice Age mountain sheep, hare, caribou, deer and bison, all of which were much larger than their modern counterparts. Hunters killed their quarry with "projectile points" made from stone nodules and bound to the tips of wooden spears.