This archive covers progress stories from North and Central America, spanning the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the nations of Central America. Readers will find reporting on health, environment, community resilience, and policy advances across the region.
Early humans in Mexico may have gathered around campfires in the Valley of Mexico as far back as 21,000 years ago. From that uncertain beginning, their descendants domesticated maize from a wild grass, built Teotihuacan into a city of 100,000, and independently invented the concept of zero — achievements still shaping the world today.
Bluefish Caves, tucked into a limestone ridge in northern Yukon, hold animal bones with stone-tool cut marks dated to roughly 24,000 years ago. A 2017 reanalysis of horse and mammoth remains confirmed those dates, suggesting people endured the Last Glacial Maximum in Beringia far earlier than the long-dominant Clovis-first timeline allowed.
Arctic migration began roughly 30,000 years ago, when people crossed into a world of months-long darkness, shifting ice, and killing winds. The Thule, ancestors of today’s Inuit, later spread across the high Arctic using kayaks, umiaks, and dog sleds. Their descendants still live there — one of humanity’s longest continuous experiments in adaptation.
