"The first Americans (pre-Columbus America): First Americans arrived from Asia thousands years ago. As food supplies improved, the population of the Americas increased. By 1500 A.D., millions of Native Americans, belonging to more than 2000 different groups, lived on the two continents of North America and South America. Among the largest and most advanced of these early civilizations were the Olmec, the Maya, the Aztec and the Inca. When Europeans arrived in the Americas in the late 1400s, they found Native Americans living there and wondered where these peoples had come from. Some believed the Native Americans had come from Atlantis, an island that was supposed to have sunk beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
Discovery and settlement of America The first European in America was a Viking explorer named Leif (leef) Ericson. He most likely reached North America around 1000, almost 500 years before Columbus. In 1492, an Italian sea captain, Christopher Columbus, convinced Spain to finance a bold plan: finding a route to Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic Ocean. In October of that year, Columbus reached an island in the Caribbean. His voyage would open the way for European colonization of the Americas – a process that would forever change the world. The immediate impact of Columbus’s voyage, however, was to increase tensions between Spain and Portugal. Columbus thought that he had indeed reached Asia. Believing him to be right, Portugal suspected that Columbus had claimed for Spain lands that Portuguese sailors might have reached first. The rivalry between Spain and Portugal grew more tense."

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