Great Trail Horse and Baby Sitter

Human habitation in the Baton Rouge area has been dated to 12000–6500 BCE, based on evidence found along the Mississippi, Comite, and Amite rivers. Earthwork mounds were built by hunter-gatherer societies in the Middle Archaic period, from roughly the fourth millennium BCE. The speakers of the Proto- Muskogean language divided into its descendant languages by about 1000 BCE; and a cultural boundary between either side of Mobile Bay and the Black Warrior River began to appear between about 1200 BCE and 500 BCE, a period called the Middle "Gulf Formational Stage". The Eastern Muskogean language began to diversify internally in the first half of the first millennium AD. The early Muskogean societies were the bearers of the Mississippian culture, which formed around 800 CE and extended in a vast network across the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, with numerous chiefdoms in the Southeast, as well.