History of Canada

The history of Canada covers the period from the arrival of Paleo-Indians thousands of years ago to the present day. Canada has been inhabited for millennia by distinctive groups of Aboriginal peoples, with distinct trade networks, spiritual beliefs, and social hierarchies. Some of these civilizations had long faded by the time of the first European arrivals and have been discovered through archaeologicalinvestigations. Various treaties and laws have been enacted between European settlers and the Aboriginal populations.

Beginning in the late 15th century French and British expeditions explored, and later settled, along the Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America to Britain in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy from the British Empire, which became official with the Statute of Westminster of 1931 and completed in the Canada Act of 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British parliament.

Over centuries, elements of Aboriginal, French, British and more recent immigrant customs have combined to form a Canadian culture. Canadian culture has also been strongly influenced by that of its linguistic, geographic and economic neighbour, the United States. Since the conclusion of the Second World War, Canadians have supported multilateralism abroad and socioeconomic developmentdomestically. Canada currently consists of ten provinces and three territories and is governed as a parliamentary democracy and aconstitutional monarchy with Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state.

 According to the  North American archeological  and  Aboriginal genetic  evidence, North and South America were the last continents in the world to have  human habitation. During the  Wisconsin glaciation, 50,000 – 17,000 years ago, falling sea levels allowed people to move across the Bering land bridge ( Beringia ) that joined  Siberia  to northwest North America ( Alaska ). At that point, they were blocked by the  Laurentide ice sheet  that covered most of Canada, confining them to Alaska for thousands of years.

 Around 16,000 years ago, the   glaciers began melting, allowing people to move south and east into Canada. The exact dates and routes of the peopling of the Americas are the subject of an ongoing debate. The   Queen Charlotte Islands,   Old Crow Flats , and   Bluefish Caves   are some of the earliest archaeological sites of   Paleo-Indians   in Canada. Ice Age   hunter-gatherers   left   lithic flake   fluted stone tools and the remains of large butchered mammals.

The North American climate stabilized around 8000 BCE (10,000 years ago). Climatic conditions were similar to modern patterns; however, the receding glacial ice sheets still covered large portions of the land, creating lakes of meltwater. Most population groups during the Archaic periods were still highly mobile hunter-gatherers. However, individual groups started to focus on resources available to them locally; thus with the passage of time, there is a pattern of increasing regional generalization (i.e.: Paleo-Arctic, Plano and Maritime Archaic traditions).