Nearly 6,000 years ago, people took the bold step of paddling their canoes out beyond the horizon of the Caribbean Sea, where no land could be seen. They were well rewarded for taking this risk, for they found a large, rich, and uninhabited chain of islands that stretched 1,500 km and contained more than 200,000 sq km of land. It was the last large area of the Americas to be explored and populated. These discoverers and their descendants have lived in the Caribbean ever since. They were eventually joined by people from other parts of the Americas and from Europe, Africa, and Asia. In the millennia that followed, their descendants went through a series of changes that in some ways paralleled what happened with people in other parts of the Americas: they developed an efficient economy that worked well in the island setting and eventually adopted a sedentary, horticultural way of life based in part on domesticated plants brought from South America.

But ever since people first moved into the Caribbean they have followed a distinctive course, one that differs from the rest of the Americas despite nearly constant contacts between Caribbean people and the surrounding mainlands. These first colonists refashioned the island environments, unintentionally and intentionally, to suit their purposes, just as present-day Caribbean people are doing. They brought in many new species and caused the extinction of many others.