Finally, in the year 2030, the United States, yielding to economic and political pressure from activists on both sides of the Atlantic, finally corrected the terrible injustice that had festered for over 19,000 years by providing reparations to the Neanderthals. This precipitated the deepest economic recession since the states of Maine, North and South Dakota, Washington, Oklahoma, New York, Arizona and Alaska were formally returned with apologies to the Native Americans in 2019, and 40% of the American GDP was donated to descendants of African slaves in 2008, and created irreconcilable east-west divisions which ultimately split the United States into three smaller countries and redrew the boundaries of Canadä. But the remaining citizens of the two non-Indian countries that resulted - the United North American Republic and the American Socialist Republic of Pacifica, with its capital at Berkeley - could finally sleep comfortably knowing that this long-standing injustice against our fellow hominid had been corrected.
Unfortunately, Americans were to receive yet another unpleasant awakening when it was discovered five short years later that their ancestors had in fact been partly responsible for oppression, discrimination, and the ultimate genocidal extinction of the dinosaurs some 65,000,000 years ago, and that a number of contemporaneously underrepresented members of the subphylum vertebrata, including several species of reptiles, amphibians, and bony fishes, were therefore deserving of compensation.
A few years later, the region experienced yet another shock when the newly-formed Federated Republic of Native American Peoples acquired nuclear weapons.