More than 10,000 years of history

According to archaeological investigations, people are known to have been living in the Maritime region of Canada for at least 10,600 years. No doubt there were people here earlier than that, but no physical traces of their presence has yet been found.

Before 13,000 years ago no one could have been living in the Maritime region because according to geological evidence almost all the land was covered by ice. The earliest known inhabitants were making weapons, butchering game animals, cleaning hides and cooking meat about 10,600 years ago at a campsite discovered in Debert, Nova Scotia. Even at the time of those hunters, small ice-caps remained in the nearby mountains.

Later this ice disappeared, the climate gradually became warmer, different kinds of forests and animals appeared (and some died out), and even the shape of the land itself changed, until the environment of the Maritime provinces came to be as we know it today.

Information presented in this section of Moncton.Net is taken from the Aboriginal Affairs Deparment of the Government of New Brunswick.