Canada technically only became a fully independent country in 1982, but its history stretches back far beyond the last 40 years. Archaeologists have painstakingly uncovered evidence of settlement dating back as far as 22,000 BC, while palaeontologists have gone back even further. From Indigenous sites that existed thousands of years ago to Canada’s recent colonial past, here we scrape the soil off some of the country’s most important and interesting archaeological discoveries.