Long before the state borders and towns in the region we now call New England were shaped by ice and time, only silence and slow geological change prevailed. Meltwater poured across the land, forming enormous glacial lakes and new river systems. The coastline lay far east of its present position, now drowned beneath the Atlantic Ocean. This 24-minute documentary posted on January 22, 2026 by World Chronicles covers the prehistory of the New England region consisting of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine and, briefly, Nova Scotia and Pennsylvania.

For tens of thousands of years, massive glaciers pressed down upon the earth, grinding mountains into valleys and carrying stone across vast distances. Beneath this ice, there were no human footprints. Around twenty thousand years ago, the climate began to warm, and the ice sheet that covered New England started to retreat northward, leaving behind a scarred and unstable landscape.

What emerged from the ice was not immediately welcoming—sparse tundra, thin soils, and extreme seasonal swings—but it was into this world that the first people arrived. They soon built fish weirs and coastal villages fed by crops of corn, beans and squash.

This documentary covers Paleoindians, megafauna, prehistoric settlement of North America, the Clovis culture, the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, the Bull Brook archaeological site, shell middens in Maine, wigwams and longhouses, the ceremonial stone landscape of New England, and the Archaic and Woodland periods of northeast pre-contact era North America.