On a tour of New York you should hear about the glacial formation of Manhattan even before the appearance of the first man on earth. The earliest records of paleo-Indians in North America date from 25,000 years ago. The settlement of New York by homo sapiens was disrupted by the vast ice sheet of the Manhattan glacier as it slowly flowed south and west from Canada. The maximum territory covered by the glacier ice sheet some 20,000 years ago reached a line dipping south to the Missouri and Ohio Rivers, and running east to New York. For a billion years after the formation of the Earth's crust, new York City lay beneath the shallow seas that covered most of the mass land of North America. By 350 million years ago, the climate had warmed and the land around New York was swampy. It was with the rise of the Appalachian range that the state of new York emerged significantly above the sea level. When the Dutch came to new Netherland, they intruded upon a native culture of the Algonquian family, a linguistic stock of tribes occupying the Atlantic coast from Maine to Chesapeake. The many tribes and sub-groups formed a confederacy which occupied the entire Delaware basin including eastern Pennsylvania and southeastern New York.