Bones: Discovering the First Americans

✍ Scribed by Dewar, Elaine

• Book ID: 109564908
• Publisher: Random House of Canada
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 755 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780307375551

✦ Synopsis

Scientists not so long ago unanimously believed that people first walked to the New World from northeast Asia across the Bering land bridge at the end of the Ice Age 11,000 years ago. But in the last ten years, new tools applied to old bones have yielded evidence that tells an entirely different story.

In Bones , Elaine Dewar records the ferocious struggle in the scientific world to reshape our views of prehistory. She traveled from the Mackenzie River valley in northern Canada to the arid plains of the Brazilian state of Piaui, from the skull-and-bones-lines offices of the Smithsonian Institution to the basement lab of an archaeologist in Washington State who wondered if the FBI was going to come for him. She met scientists at war with each other and sought to see for herself the oldest human remains on these continents. Along the way, she found that the old answer to the question of who were the First Americans was steeped in the bitter tea of...