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The first humans to live in the Spokane area were hunter-gatherers that lived off plentiful fish and game; early human remains have been dated to 8,000 to 13,000 years ago. The Spokane tribe, after which the city is named (the name meaning "children of the sun" or "sun people" in Salishan), [a] are believed to be either their direct descendants, or descendants of people from the Great Plains. When asked by early white explorers, the Spokanes said their ancestors came from "up North." Early in the 19th century, the Northwest Fur Company sent two white fur trappers west of the Rocky Mountains to search for fur. These were the first white men met by the Spokanes, who believed they were sacred, and set the trappers up in the Colville River valley for the winter. The explorer-geographer David Thompson, working as head of the North West Company's Columbia Department, became the first European to explore the Inland Empire (now called the Inland Northwest).