First Peoples in a New World
eBook - PDF

First Peoples in a New World

Colonizing Ice Age America

  1. 464 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

First Peoples in a New World

Colonizing Ice Age America

About this book

More than 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America, a continent that was then truly a new world. Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology. This dazzling, cutting-edge synthesis, written for a wide audience by an archaeologist who has long been at the center of these debates, tells the scientific story of the first Americans: where they came from, when they arrived, and how they met the challenges of moving across the vast, unknown landscapes of Ice Age North America. David J. Meltzer pulls together the latest ideas from archaeology, geology, linguistics, skeletal biology, genetics, and other fields to trace the breakthroughs that have revolutionized our understanding in recent years. Among many other topics, he explores disputes over the hemisphere's oldest and most controversial sites and considers how the first Americans coped with changing global climates. He also confronts some radical claims: that the Americas were colonized from Europe or that a crashing comet obliterated the Pleistocene megafauna. Full of entertaining descriptions of on-site encounters, personalities, and controversies, this is a compelling behind-the-scenes account of how science is illuminating our past.

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Yes, you can access First Peoples in a New World by David J. Meltzer in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Evolution. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Preface
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. 1. Overture
  6. 2. The Landscape of Colonization
  7. 3. From Paleoliths to Paleoindians
  8. 4. The Pre-Clovis Controversy and its Resolution
  9. 5. Non-Archaeological Answers to Archaelogical Questions
  10. 6. American Origins
  11. 7. What Do You Do When No One's Been There Before?
  12. Plate Inserts
  13. 8. Clovis Adaptations and Pleistocene Extinctions
  14. 9. Settling In
  15. 10. When Past and Present Collide
  16. Further Reading
  17. Notes
  18. References
  19. Index