Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America's Clovis Culture - Prehistoric Migration, Archaeology & Ancient American History Book - Perfect for Students, Researchers & History Enthusiasts

It wasn't long after the discovery of the "New World" that men of science began wondering about the regions indigenous people. Had they always been here or had they migrated from other lands to settle in North America? The obvious choice was that family groups of Ice Age hunter-gatherers had walked over a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska about 13,000 years ago. From there our intrepid "Paleo-Indians" had followed a southerly route till they came to the fertile plains and forests of a new land just south of the ice-sheet. Game animals were abundant and there was lots of room for our travelers spread out and prosper. And spread out they did, from coast to coast and southward too, to yet another continent. While doing all this prospering, they took time out to invent the Clovis Point and to hunt the Ice Age Mega-Fauna to extinction. The rest, they say, is history. Or is it? For the most part, this scenario was accepted as "Gospel" by the Archeological community but early on, almost from the beginning, dissenting voices were heard. Throughout North and South America some Paleolithic sites were being dated as older than the 13,000 YBP mark, some as far back as 20,000 to 30,000 YBP. There may be more to this story after all. In "Across Atlantic Ice" authors Dennis J Stanford and Bruce A Bradley fill you in on a different hypothesis on how and when the first Americans may have gotten here. Is it possible that Ice Age Mariners had migrated west, along the edge of the ice floe, from somewhere in Europe, more specifically, the Iberian Peninsula? To reach this conclusion the authors have spent years studying and analyzing lithic and bone artifacts from sites in North America, from Alaska to Florida, searching for a time line tracing the development of the Clovis Culture. Traditionally Clovis was thought to have its roots in Siberia but was not fully developed until it's Ice Age inventors had crossed the Beringia Land Bridge and reached the southern plains of North America. Stanford and Bradley's research has led them to believe the opposite; Clovis was first developed along the "eastern" seaboard of Paleo-America and may have had its roots in and around the the Pyrenees Mountains of Southern France and Northern Spain. To explain their paradigm changing idea the authors start with a kind of Primer for making and analyzing stone tools that I found to be rather technical and kind of a tough read. But this Primer came in handy when it was time to compare the Clovis Culture, in the U.S., to the Solutrean Culture in Iberia. The second half of the book covers the authors's hypothesis and their interpretation of the data available. On the whole this is a well written and informative book that gave me plenty of "food for thought". Looks to me like we have three possibilities here: One: ice Age Mariners followed Atlantic currents along the sea-ice edge to colonize North America far earlier than previously suspected. Two: a similar idea proposes that other Paleolithic Mariners from South East Asia/Siberia followed the ice front of the North Pacific to eventually settle on the western seaboard of the Americas, well before 13,000 YBP. Three: then there's our heroic Mammoth Hunters crossing the Beringia Land Bridge and ending up in an "American Serengeti". To me a combination of the three makes sense, with far ranging travelers reaching North America in wave after wave, all from different sources. (*) This book was perfect for me and if you're at all interested in Natural History and how humans first came to North America then it may be a good fit for you too. I highly recommend it. I had no technical or formatting problems with this Kindle edition.(*) For more on this interesting subject see Tom Koppel's "Lost World" and "The First Americans" by J.M. Adovasio.Last Ranger