Where are the Native Americans?

New Ternathia (North America) and New Farnalia (South America) on Sharona are described as being settled by people from the parent countries... but we have evidence of human inhabitation of the Americas dating back to more than 20,000 years. Did Weber just forget there were people who would have been there already?

Taurus2 wrote:New Ternathia (North America) and New Farnalia (South America) on Sharona are described as being settled by people from the parent countries... but we have evidence of human inhabitation of the Americas dating back to more than 20,000 years. Did Weber just forget there were people who would have been there already?

Different worlds, possibly different histories.

I think it's fairly likely that "settled" here may mean more or less what it did in our history, which is "the colonists ran over the natives". Ternathia seems to have a much deeper history than our world (several thousand years of empire), so it would have looked a lot like "Romans or equivalent getting into North America while it was still very lightly populated with hunter-gatherers instead of farmers". There are probably archaeologists or historians who would know a lot of the details, but so far it hasn't been important for any of our viewpoint characters, so it hasn't come up.

Or maybe, just maybe, in Sharona no one ever crossed the Bering Strait (or whatever they call it there) and the first Ternathian explorers ended up on a virgin continent... no way to tell without more detail, and if it's not plot-relevant would it ever come up in the stories?