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A Stone Age detective story reveals that the peopling of
the Americas is a far more tantalizing riddle than anyone had ever
suspected.
Who were the first Americans and where did they come from? The
conventional view is that ancient big-game hunters entered the
Americas across the Bering land bridge - a strip of dry
land that spanned the Bering Strait between Asia and Alaska during
the last Ice Age some 12,000 years ago. But in recent years, a wave
of startling discoveries has overturned that idea. The first
Americans almost certainly came thousands of years earlier,
traveling in skin boats and living off sea mammals along the edge
of the ice. Now a truly provocative theory has stirred a storm of
disbelief and argument among archaeologists. A leading prehistorian
at the Smithsonian Institution claims that some of these first
canoe-borne migrants came not from Asia but Europe, and that they
crossed the Atlantic in skin boats by following the fringes of the
ice sheets. This Stone Age detective story reveals that the
peopling of the Americas is a far more tantalizing riddle than
anyone had ever suspected.
