Crossroads, p. 8
The area that is now the northeastern states, including the northern half of Arkansas, was uninhabited or only lightly inhabited between 7000 and 4500 B.C. This was the climatic period called the "Hypsithermal" when the climate became much warmer and drier than it is today, turning the once productive tundras and forests of the Northeast into hot wastelands, barely fit for humans or animals. During the Hypsithermal most of the people in eastern North America were living along the Gulf Coastal Plain from Florida to Louisiana, and inland to about the latitude of southern Arkansas, where there were hardwood forests that would gradually spread northward to become the Eastern Woodlands of today, a process that took 8,000 years.
The forests and the rivers of the Gulf Coastal Plain were full of edibles: fish, shellfish, reptiles, deer, small game, nuts, seeds, fruits, berries, roots. But many of these foods, particularly the nuts, fish, shellfish, and reptiles, would have been unfamiliar to the Paleo Indians because they were people of the tundras, grasslands, and northern pine forests--called taigas--where most of the food was meat. When they entered the hardwood forests of the Southeast they were finally encountering an environment that was truly different from the one that they and their ancestors had known and been well adapted to for 30,000 years. In order to live in this new environment they had to change from a diet that was probably 90% animal food, like that of the Arctic Eskimo (the one group of Eurasian Upper Paleolithic hunters who survived down to modern times), to a diet that was probably at least 60% plant food. This must have been done by trial and error over many generations. The costs in malnutrition and dietary deficiency diseases may have been considerable because the nutritional qualities of plant foods are different from those of animal foods, and it is generally more difficult to meet basic nutritional requirements with a diet based on plant foods.
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