Introduction to natural
and cultural history

The Red Hill Valley is an environmental feature associated with the Niagara Escarpment – the most prominent landscape feature in Southern Ontario. It was formed over 500 to 400 million years ago during the Paleozoic Era, during a period when Ontario was covered by warm, shallow water.

The environment as it was known to the first humans in the valley had its beginnings at the start of the last major continental glaciation around 75,000 years ago. The three-kilometre thick continental glacier, known as the Laurentide Ice Sheet, gradually flowed southward for thousands of years, reaching its maximum southerly extent in Ohio around 20,000 years ago. When that ice finally began to withdraw and melt around 14,000 years ago, it left behind a complex layer of glacial deposits across the province – deposits that can still be seen in the valley.

For a short time after this, Southern Ontario was carpeted by tundra vegetation – the kind of environment we see in the subarctic region of Canada today. Huge meltwater lakes appeared after the ice melted, and the people that came to live on their shores would have pursued animals such as caribou, mastodon and mammoths that roamed freely around the lake’s edges.

This tundra-like environment was eventually replaced by an open-spruced parkland and then was gradually replaced by mixed needle and broadleaf forest roughly 8,000 years ago. By this stage, the elephant species (mammoths) had become extinct, but people living in the region continued to hunt game such as moose, deer, elk and beaver, as well as game birds such as wild turkey and ruffed grouse.