The first known people to live in what is now New Jersey arrived near the end of the last Ice Age, at least 13,000 years ago.

Archaeologists call them Paleoindians, a modern term for the earliest known human inhabitants of the region. They lived in a very different landscape from the one we know today.

During the height of the last Ice Age (Wisconsinan Glaciation), the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered northern New Jersey, reaching approximately the area of present-day Perth Amboy, Morristown, and Belvidere. By the time we have strong evidence for Paleoindian occupation of New Jersey, the glacier itself had been gone from the state for several thousand years, although its effects on the landscape, vegetation, rivers, lakes, and wildlife remained profound.

As the climate warmed, tundra and open woodland gradually gave way to forests. Paleoindians hunted and gathered across this changing landscape, sharing the region with animals very different from those found here today. Mastodons are well documented in New Jersey, while caribou, elk, giant beavers (6-7’ length), and other species inhabited New Jersey or the surrounding Northeast during the late Ice Age. Distinctive fluted stone projectile points, including Clovis-style points, provide some of the earliest archaeological evidence of people in the region. While Paleoindians and mastodons overlapped in time, possibly for a thousand years or more, no New Jersey archaeological site has demonstrated that Paleoindians hunted mastodons.

Over the roughly 10,000 years separating the Paleoindian period from the historically documented Lenape, populations could have migrated into the region, moved elsewhere, merged with other populations, divided into new communities, or been absorbed by later groups. Languages and cultural traditions could also have changed. Archaeology records changes in stone tools, settlement patterns, foodways, pottery, and trade, but it cannot always tell us whether those changes represent new people arriving or existing populations adapting over time.

Our ability to connect earlier peoples with the historic Lenape becomes stronger as we move forward in time. Connections remain highly uncertain through the Paleoindian and Archaic periods, but by the Late Woodland period, particularly after about AD 1000, archaeological evidence begins to show stronger links to the communities Europeans later identified as Lenape. By the 1600s, written records provide direct historical evidence.

The Paleoindians of New Jersey may therefore have included distant ancestors of later Native peoples, potentially including the Lenape, but we cannot assume that they were Lenape ancestors simply because they occupied the same region thousands of years earlier.