Atlas of a lost world : travels in ice age America
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 245-257) and index.

"From the author of Apocalyptic Planet, comes a vivid travelogue through prehistory that traces the arrival of the first people in North America at least twenty thousand years ago and describes the artifacts that tell of their lives and fates. Scientistssquabble over the locations and dates for human arrival in the New World. The first explorers of the New World were few, their encampments fleeting. At some point in time, between twenty and forty thousand years ago, sea levels were low enough that a vastland bridge was exposed between Asia and North America. But the land bridge was not the only way across. This book upends our notions of where these people came from and who they were. The unpeopled continent they reached was inhabited by megafauna--mastodons, giant bears, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, five-hundred-pound panthers, enormous bison, and sloths that stood one story tall. The first people were hunters (Paleolithic spear points are still encrusted with the proteins of their prey) but they werewildly outnumbered and many would themselves have been prey to the much larger animals. This is a chronicle of the last millennia of the Ice Age: the violent oscillations and retreat of glaciers, the clues and traces that document the first encounters ofearly humans, and the animals whose presence governed the humans' chances for survival"--,Provided by publisher.