How Long Have Humans Lived In Wyoming

Here's an interesting question: how long have people been living in what we now call Wyoming?

That number keeps changing as new evedence is literally uncovered. Nothing is settled. The timeline is debated, moving the established arrival date from roughly 13,000 years ago to well beyond 20,000—or even 130,000—years ago. We just don't know for sure.

The current evidence shows that humans have been living in what is now Wyoming for at least 12,000 to 16,000 years. A site in Sunrise, Wyoming, gives us an estimate of human activity about 16,000 years ago.

That would lead you to ask how scientists came to that date.

Studying ancient artifacts, animal remains, and the soil layers around them using scientific dating methods. But also, digging down into layers of soil and rock gives us a timeline idea. We also have evedence based on what they made tools out of and ate. That helps set the date.

We have found evedence of Paleo-Indian hunter-gatherers who arrived at the end of the last Ice Age. Clovis people inhabited parts of Wyoming roughly 13,000 years ago as highly mobile hunter-gatherers. There is evedence of them during the end of the last Ice Age.

Obviously, the climate is always changing. It is a natural thing. The world was in an ice age, meaning Wyoming was considerably colder and drier than it is today. Much of the region was a treeless tundra, though glaciers sat nearby in the high mountain ranges. When the Clovis people lived in Wyoming, the region was much colder and drier at the end of the last Ice Age.

The region was home to massive, now-extinct Ice Age animals (megafauna). The environment supported mammoths, ancient horses, camels, ground sloths, musk oxen, and caribou.