Eight thousand to twelve thousand years ago, the area that is now Randolph County was home to mastodons, woolly mammoths, giant beavers, giant ground sloths, giant short-faced bears, and saber-toothed tigers, and fossil remains of these animals found there are now exhibited by local and state museums. Millions of years earlier, during the Paleozoic era, small sea-dwelling invertebrates populated east central Indiana. The Ice Age of eighteen thousand to twenty thousand years ago brought glaciers slowly over the terrain of what is now Randolph County, leaving kettle holes where chunks of glacial ice dug into the ground; after the ice melted over hundreds of years, silt and vegetation filled the small lakes and turned them into marsh and prairie land. Indigenous people occupied the area thousands of years before the first European explorers arrived in the seventeen hundreds and settlers came in the early eighteen hundreds. As early as 1,700 BC, during the early woodland era, mound Indians, also known as Adena, lived in what is now Randolph County and were notable for agricultural practices, pottery, artistic works, and extensive trading networks. One of the most significant mound communities in the Midwest, known as Fudge Mound, stood slightly north and west of Winchester, and two other mound communities are found about one and one-half mile northwest of Lynn. From around two hundred B.C. to five hundred A.D., during the middle woodland era, an indigenous population associated with the Hopewell Indians occupied the Ohio Valley region, including east central Indiana. Later tribes in the area that became Randolph County included the Lenape, or Delaware, who lived there from the seventeen nineties to eighteen twenties before removal to Kansas and ultimately Oklahoma under various federal treaties, and notable leaders who once camped or conducted business there, especially along the White and Mississinewa Rivers, included Tecumseh and his brother The Prophet.