Download or read book The Last Giant of Beringia written by Dan O'Neill and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-29 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intriguing theory of a land bridge periodically linking Siberia and Alaska during the coldest pulsations of the Ice Ages had been much debated since Jose de Acosta, a Spanish missionary working in Mexico and Peru, first proposed the idea of a connection between the continents in 1589. But proof of the land bridge - now named Beringia after eighteenth-century Danish explorer Vitus Bering - eluded scientists until an inquiring geologist named Dave Hopkins emerged from rural New England and set himself to the task of solving the mystery. Through the life story of Hopkins, The Last Giant of Beringia reveals the fascinating science detective story that at last confirmed the existence of the land bridge that served as the intercontinental migration route for such massive Ice Age beasts as woolly mammoths, steppe bison, giant stag-moose, dire wolves, short-faced bears, and saber-toothed cats - and for the first humans to enter the New World from Asia. After proving unambiguously that the land bridge existed, Hopkins went on to show that the Beringian landscape cannot have been the "polar desert" that many had claimed, but provided forage enough to sustain a diverse menagerie of Ice Age behemoths.
Download or read book A Land Gone Lonesome written by Dan O'Neill and published by New York : Counterpoint. This book was released on 2006-05-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his square-sterned canoe, Alaskan author Dan O'Neill set off down the majestic Yukon River, beginning at Dawson, Yukon Territory, site of the Klondike gold rush. The journey he makes to Circle City, Alaska, is more than a voyage into northern wilderness, it is an expedition into the history of the river and a record of the inimitable inhabitants of the region, historic and contemporary. A literary kin of John Muir's Travels in Alaska and John McPhee's Coming into the Country, A Land Gone Lonesome is the book on Alaska for the new century. Though he treks through a beautiful and hostile wilderness, the heart of O'Neill's story is his exploration of the lives of a few tough souls clinging to the old ways-even as government policies are extinguishing their way of life. More than just colorful anachronisms, these wilderness dwellers-both men and women-are a living archive of North American pioneer values. As O'Neill encounters these natives, he finds himself drawn into the bare-knuckle melodrama of frontier life-and further back still into the very origins of the Yukon river world. With the rare perspective of an insider, O'Neill here gives us an intelligent, lyrical-and ultimately, probably the last-portrait of the river people along the upper Yukon.
Download or read book Steller s Island written by Dean Littlepage and published by The Mountaineers Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History, adventure, and science-the 18th century naturalist, Georg Steller, sailed to the north coast of North America and introduced its biological wonders to the world.
Download or read book The Firecracker Boys written by Dan O'Neill and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-06-23 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1958, Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, unveiled his plan to detonate six nuclear bombs off the Alaskan coast to create a new harbor. However, the plan was blocked by a handful of Eskimos and biologists who succeeded in preventing massive nuclear devastation potentially far greater than that of the Chernobyl blast. The Firecracker Boys is a story of the U.S. government's arrogance and deception, and the brave people who fought against it-launching America's environmental movement. As one of Alaska's most prominent authors, Dan O'Neill brings to these pages his love of Alaska's landscape, his skill as a nature and science writer, and his determination to expose one of the most shocking chapters of the Nuclear Age.
Download or read book The Bering Land Bridge written by David Moody Hopkins and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1967 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Data of geology, oceanography, paleontology, plant geography, and anthropology focus on problems and lessons of Beringia. Includes papers presented at Symposium held at VII Congress of International Association for Quaternary Research, Boulder, Colorado, 1965.
Download or read book Denisovan Origins written by Andrew Collins and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the profound influence of the Denisovans and their hybrid descendants upon the flowering of human civilization around the world • Traces the migrations of the sophisticated Denisovans and their interbreeding with Neanderthals and early human populations more than 40,000 years ago • Shows how Denisovan hybrids became the elite of ancient societies, including the Adena mound-building culture • Explores the Denisovans’ extraordinary advances, including precision-machined stone tools and jewelry, tailored clothing, and celestially-aligned architecture Ice-age cave artists, the builders at Göbekli Tepe, and the mound-builders of North America all share a common ancestry in the Solutreans, Neanderthal-human hybrids of immense sophistication, who dominated southwest Europe before reaching North America 20,000 years ago. Yet, even before the Solutreans, the American continent was home to a powerful population of enormous stature, giants remembered in Native American legend as the Thunder People. New research shows they were hybrid descendants of an extinct human group known as the Denisovans, whose existence has now been confirmed from fossil remains found in a cave in the Altai region of Siberia. Tracing the migrations of the Denisovans and their interbreeding with Neanderthals and early human populations in Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas, Andrew Collins and Greg Little explore how the new mental capabilities of the Denisovan-Neanderthal and Denisovan-human hybrids greatly accelerated the flowering of human civilization over 40,000 years ago. They show how the Denisovans displayed sophisticated advances, including precision-machined stone tools and jewelry, tailored clothing, celestially-aligned architecture, and horse domestication. Examining evidence from ancient America, the authors reveal how Denisovan hybrids became the elite of the Adena mound-building culture, explaining the giant skeletons found in Native American burial mounds. The authors also explore how the Denisovans’ descendants were the creators of a cosmological death journey and viewed the Milky Way as the Path of Souls. Revealing the impact of the Denisovans upon every part of the world, the authors show that, without early man’s hybridization with Denisovans, Neanderthals, and other yet-to-be-discovered hominid populations, the modern world as we know it would not exist.
Download or read book After the Ice Age written by E.C. Pielou and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating story of how a harsh terrain that resembled modern Antarctica has been transformed gradually into the forests, grasslands, and wetlands we know today.
Download or read book Flight Maps adventures With Nature In Modern America written by Jennifer Jaye Price and published by . This book was released on 1999-04-22 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A quirky, brilliant debut book that explores the evolution of our relationship to nature and the ways in which we attach meaning to it today. "Flight Maps" should find its place on any bookshelf with the likes of David Quammen and John McPhee.
Download or read book Walter Harper Alaska Native Son written by Mary F. Ehrlander and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Harper, Alaska Native Son illuminates the life of the remarkable Irish-Athabascan man who was the first person to summit Mount Denali, North America's tallest mountain. Born in 1893, Walter Harper was the youngest child of Jenny Albert and the legendary gold prospector Arthur Harper. His parents separated shortly after his birth, and his mother raised Walter in the Athabascan tradition, speaking her Koyukon-Athabascan language. When Walter was seventeen years old, Episcopal archdeacon Hudson Stuck hired the skilled and charismatic youth as his riverboat pilot and winter trail guide. During the following years, as the two traveled among Interior Alaska's Episcopal missions, they developed a father-son-like bond and summited Denali together in 1913. Walter's strong Athabascan identity allowed him to remain grounded in his birth culture as his Western education expanded and he became a leader and a bridge between Alaska Native peoples and Westerners in the Alaska territory. He planned to become a medical missionary in Interior Alaska, but his life was cut short at the age of twenty-five, in the Princess Sophia disaster of 1918 near Skagway, Alaska. Harper exemplified resilience during an era when rapid socioeconomic and cultural change was wreaking havoc in Alaska Native villages. Today he stands equally as an exemplar of Athabascan manhood and healthy acculturation to Western lifeways whose life will resonate with today's readers.
Download or read book EYR THE HUNTER written by Margaret Zehmer Searcy and published by Pelican Publishing Company. This book was released on 1995-10-31 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Travel back 12,000 years and learn of Eyr, a youngster who saved his tribe from a woolly mammoth as they traveled from Siberia to Alaska . . . well told in metered verse that flows smoothly throughout...Realistic sketches in burnished colored pencil show details of clothing, family life, and geography." --Children's Literature In this tale, a young Ice-Age boy plays a key role in the survival of his band more than twelve thousand years ago. Eyr s band is hungry and in need of new skins. The old seer predicts a coming snow, and without a good supply ofmeat, the band may starve or die of cold. Eyr walks over meadows and hills with the other hunters looking for tracks, but they return with little game. That night Eyr dreams of killing the great woolly mammoth with his sharp spear. He imagines how his band would dance and feast, with food to last them through the dark winter. The next morning the bands hunter-leader wakes him. Having reached the age that he can hunt alone, Eyr is sent to scout the large beaststhat roam the tundra, especially the woolly mammoths. Taking only his cape, his knife, his spear, and a smoldering ember, Eyr sets out to become a man and save his band.Told in rhyming couplets, just as many ancient storytellers told the epic tales of the past, Eyr the Hunter: A Story of Ice-Age America is based upon many facts. Margaret Zehmer Searcy is a cultural anthropologist who has taught classes about Native Americans and their customs for more than two decades in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama. She has visited archaeological sites and is familiar with the kinds of animals that existed in the Ice-Age landscape. Joyce Haynes has won numerous local, state, and national awards for her illustrations. She has illustrated more than a dozen books and is the author of Drawing Wild Animals . She lives in Southwest Missouri.A story both involving and entertaining, Eyr the Hunter: A Story of Ice-Age America is made all the more moving by its wonderful rhythms and use of vivid detail. A childrens book that can be likened to the Clan of the Cave Bear series, this book can also be useful for explaining how the earliest Americans led their lives. It is a wonderful tie-in to any discussion about native cultures around the world as well.
Download or read book Convergence written by Peter Watson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Those seeking a grand overview of science’s greatest hits over the past century will find it here” (The Washington Post). Peter Watson’s bold history of science offers a powerful argument—that the many disparate scientific branches are converging on the same truths. Convergence is a history of modern science with an original and significant twist. Various scientific disciplines, despite their very different beginnings, have been coming together over the years, converging and coalescing. Intimate connections have been discovered between physics and chemistry, psychology and biology, genetics and linguistics. In this groundbreaking book, Peter Watson identifies one extraordinary master narrative, capturing how the sciences are slowly resolving into one overwhelming, interlocking story about the universe. Watson begins his narrative in the 1850s, the decade when, he argues, the convergence of the sciences began. The idea of the conservation of energy was introduced in this decade, as was Darwin’s theory of evolution—both of which rocketed the sciences forward and revealed unimagined interconnections and overlaps between disciplines. Decade after decade, the story captures every major scientific advance en route to the present, proceeding like a cosmic detective story, or the world’s most massive code-breaking effort. “Fascinating…Highly recommended…Watson treats biology, chemistry, and physics as entangled plotlines, and readers’ excitement will build as more connections are made” (Library Journal, starred review). Told through the eyes of the scientists themselves, charting each discovery and breakthrough, Convergence is a “massive tour de force” (Publishers Weekly) and a gripping way to learn what we now know about the universe and where our inquiries are heading.
Download or read book Stubborn Gal written by Dan O'Neill and published by University of Alaska Press. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stubborn Gal is the true story of a sixty-mile sled dog race and a young woman determined, if not exactly qualified, to run it. A grandfather tells his granddaughter Sarah about another, older Sarah and her adventure with sled dogs. The older Sarah, bored and alone one winter long ago, decides to enter her first sled dog race. After a few hilariously disastrous training runs, and discouraging advice from some local mushers, the big day comes. At the end of the race, Stubborn Sarah surprises everyone, including herself. It is an inspiring story that shows that a lot of determination—and a little luck—can go a long way.
Download or read book America Before written by Graham Hancock and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Instant New York Times Bestseller! Was an advanced civilization lost to history in the global cataclysm that ended the last Ice Age? Graham Hancock, the internationally bestselling author, has made it his life's work to find out--and in America Before, he draws on the latest archaeological and DNA evidence to bring his quest to a stunning conclusion. We’ve been taught that North and South America were empty of humans until around 13,000 years ago – amongst the last great landmasses on earth to have been settled by our ancestors. But new discoveries have radically reshaped this long-established picture and we know now that the Americas were first peopled more than 130,000 years ago – many tens of thousands of years before human settlements became established elsewhere. Hancock's research takes us on a series of journeys and encounters with the scientists responsible for the recent extraordinary breakthroughs. In the process, from the Mississippi Valley to the Amazon rainforest, he reveals that ancient "New World" cultures share a legacy of advanced scientific knowledge and sophisticated spiritual beliefs with supposedly unconnected "Old World" cultures. Have archaeologists focused for too long only on the "Old World" in their search for the origins of civilization while failing to consider the revolutionary possibility that those origins might in fact be found in the "New World"? America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization is the culmination of everything that millions of readers have loved in Hancock's body of work over the past decades, namely a mind-dilating exploration of the mysteries of the past, amazing archaeological discoveries and profound implications for how we lead our lives today.
Download or read book Hawthorn written by Bill Vaughn and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of humankind’s oldest companions, the hawthorn tree, is bound up in the memories of every recorded age and the plot lines of cultures all across the Northern Hemisphere. Hawthorn examines the little-recognized political, cultural, and natural history of this ancient spiky plant. Used for thousands of years in the impenetrable living fences that defined the landscapes of Europe, the hawthorn eventually helped feed the class antagonism that led to widespread social upheaval. In the American Midwest, hawthorn-inspired hedges on the prairies made nineteenth-century farming economically rewarding for the first time. Later, in Normandy, mazelike hedgerows bristling with these thorns nearly cost the Allies World War II. Bill Vaughn shines light on the full scope of the tree’s influence over human events. He also explores medicinal uses of the hawthorn, the use of its fruit in the world’s first wine, and the symbolic role its spikes and flowers played in pagan beliefs and Christian iconography. As entertaining as it is illuminating, this book is the first full appreciation of the hawthorn’s abundant connections with humanity.
Download or read book Beringia written by Robert D. Morritt and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a study of the migration of cultures from Asia to North America from the earliest period of recorded history. Evidence is presented of a connection between the North American Athabaskan language family and Siberia, together with comparisons and examinations of the implications of linguistics from anthropological, archaeological and folklore perspectives. An exploration of the origins of the earliest people in the Americas, this book covers topics including Siberian, Dene and Navajo Creation myths; linguistic comparisons between Siberian Ket Navajo and Western Apache; and comparisons between indigenous groups that appear to share the same origin.
Download or read book Future Arctic written by Edward Struzik and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one hundred years, or even fifty, the Arctic will look dramatically different than it does today. As polar ice retreats and animals and plants migrate northward, the arctic landscape is morphing into something new and very different from what it once was. While these changes may seem remote, they will have a profound impact on a host of global issues, from international politics to animal migrations. In Future Arctic, journalist and explorer Edward Struzik offers a clear-eyed look at the rapidly shifting dynamics in the Arctic region, a harbinger of changes that will reverberate throughout our entire world. Future Arctic reveals the inside story of how politics and climate change are altering the polar world in a way that will have profound effects on economics, culture, and the environment as we know it. Struzik takes readers up mountains and cliffs, and along for the ride on snowmobiles and helicopters, sailboats and icebreakers. His travel companions, from wildlife scientists to military strategists to indigenous peoples, share diverse insights into the science, culture and geopolitical tensions of this captivating place. With their help, Struzik begins piecing together an environmental puzzle: How might the land’s most iconic species—caribou, polar bears, narwhal—survive? Where will migrating birds flock to? How will ocean currents shift? And what fundamental changes will oil and gas exploration have on economies and ecosystems? How will vast unclaimed regions of the Arctic be divided? A unique combination of extensive on-the-ground research, compelling storytelling, and policy analysis, Future Arctic offers a new look at the changes occurring in this remote, mysterious region and their far-reaching effects.
Download or read book Popular Controversies in World History 4 volumes written by Steven L. Danver and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-12-22 with total page 1516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering prehistoric times to the modern era, this fascinating resource presents pro-and-con arguments regarding unresolved, historic controversies throughout the development of the world. Popular Controversies in World History: Investigating History's Intriguing Questions offers uniquely compelling and educational examinations of pivotal events and puzzling phenomena, from the earliest evidence of human activity to controversial events of the 20th century. From the geographic location of human origins, to the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, to the innocence—or guilt—of Sacco and Vanzetti, Popular Controversies in World History: Investigating History's Intriguing Questions provides four volumes on the ongoing debates that have captivated both the historical community and the public at large. In each chapter, established experts offer credible opposing arguments pertaining to specific debates, providing readers with resources for independent critical thinking on the issue. This format allows students, scholars, and other interested readers to actively engage in some of the most intriguing conundrums facing historians today.
