Download or read book American Beginnings written by Frederick Hadleigh West and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-12 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last Ice Age, a thousand-mile-wide land bridge connected Siberia and Alaska, creating the region known as Beringia. Over twelve thousand years ago, a procession of large mammals and the humans who hunted them crossed this bridge to America. Much of the Russian evidence for this migration has until now remained largely inaccessible to American scholars. American Beginnings brings together for the first time in one volume the most up-to-date archaeological and palaeoecological evidence on Beringia from both Russia and America. "An invaluable resource. . . . It will no doubt remain the key reference book for Beringia for many years to come."—Steven Mithen, Journal of Human Evolution "Extraordinary. The fifty-six contributors . . . represent the most prominent American and Russian researchers in the region."—Choice "Publication of this well-illustrated compendium is a great service to early American and especially Siberian Upper Paleolithic archaeology."—Nicholas Saunders, New Scientist "This is a great book . . . perhaps the greatest contribution to the archaeology of Beringia that has yet been published. . . . This is the kind of book to which archaeology should aspire."—Herbert D.G. Maschner, Antiquity

Download or read book The Archaeology of Beringia written by Frederick Hadleigh West and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Human Ecology of Beringia written by John F. Hoffecker and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-five thousand years ago, sea level fell more than 400 feet below its present position as a consequence of the growth of immense ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere. A dry plain stretching 1,000 miles from the Arctic Ocean to the Aleutians became exposed between northeast Asia and Alaska, and across that plain, most likely, walked the first people of the New World. This book describes what is known about these people and the now partly submerged land, named Beringia, which they settled during the final millennia of the Ice Age. Humans first occupied Beringia during a twilight period when rising sea levels had not yet caught up with warming climates. Although the land bridge between northeast Asia and Alaska was still present, warmer and wetter climates were rapidly transforming the Beringian steppe into shrub tundra. This volume synthesizes current research-some previously unpublished-on the archaeological sites and rapidly changing climates and biota of the period, suggesting that the absence of woody shrubs to help fire bone fuel may have been the barrier to earlier settlement, and that from the outset the Beringians developed a postglacial economy similar to that of later northern interior peoples. The book opens with a review of current research and the major problems and debates regarding the environment and archaeology of Beringia. It then describes Beringian environments and the controversies surrounding their interpretation; traces the evolving adaptations of early humans to the cold environments of northern Eurasia, which set the stage for the settlement of Beringia; and provides a detailed account of the archaeological record in three chapters, each of which is focused on a specific slice of time between 15,000 and 11,500 years ago. In conclusion, the authors present an interpretive summary of the human ecology of Beringia and discuss its relationship to the wider problem of the peopling of the New World.

Download or read book Dry Creek written by W. Roger Powers and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-31 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With cultural remains dated unequivocally to 13,000 calendar years ago, Dry Creek assumed major importance upon its excavation and study by W. Roger Powers. The site was the first to conclusively demonstrate a human presence that could be dated to the same time as the Bering Land Bridge. As Powers and his team studied the site, their work verified initial expectations. Unfortunately, the research was never fully published. Dry Creek: The Archaeology and Paleoecology of a Late Pleistocene Alaskan Hunting Camp is ready to take its rightful place in the ongoing research into the peopling of the Americas. Containing the original research, this book also updates and reconsiders Dry Creek in light of more recent discoveries and analysis.

Download or read book Entering America written by David B. Madsen and published by University of Utah Press. This book was released on 2004-09-16 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides up-to-date information on the nature of environmental and cultural conditions in northeast Asia and Beringia (the Bering land bridge) immediately prior to the Last Glacial Maximum.

Download or read book Bones written by Elaine Dewar and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-03-04 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 racism. Bones explores the ambiguous terrain left behind when a scientific paradigm is swept away. It tells the stories of the archaeologists, Native American activists, DNA experts and physical anthropologists scrambling for control of ancient bones of Kennewick Man, Spirit Cave, and the oldest one of all, a woman named Luzia. At stake are professional reputations, lucrative grants, fame, vindication, even the reburial of wandering spirits. The weapons? Lawsuits, threats, violence. The battlefield stretches from Chile to Alaska. Dewar tells the stories that never find their way into scientific papers — stories of mysterious deaths, of the bones of evil shamen and the shadows falling on the lives of scientists who pulled them from the ground. And she asks the new questions arising out of the science of bones and the stories of first peoples: "What if Native Americans are right in their belief that they have always been in the Americas and did not migrate to the New World at the end of the Ice Age? What if the New World's human story is as long and complicated as that of the Old? What if the New World and the Old World have always been one?"

Download or read book Origin written by Jennifer Raff and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! From celebrated anthropologist Jennifer Raff comes the untold story—and fascinating mystery—of how humans migrated to the Americas. ORIGIN is the story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they made the crossing, how they dispersed south, and how they lived based on a new and powerful kind of evidence: their complete genomes. ORIGIN provides an overview of these new histories throughout North and South America, and a glimpse into how the tools of genetics reveal details about human history and evolution. 20,000 years ago, people crossed a great land bridge from Siberia into Western Alaska and then dispersed southward into what is now called the Americas. Until we venture out to other worlds, this remains the last time our species has populated an entirely new place, and this event has been a subject of deep fascination and controversy. No written records—and scant archaeological evidence—exist to tell us what happened or how it took place. Many different models have been proposed to explain how the Americas were peopled and what happened in the thousands of years that followed. A study of both past and present, ORIGIN explores how genetics is currently being used to construct narratives that profoundly impact Indigenous peoples of the Americas. It serves as a primer for anyone interested in how genetics has become entangled with identity in the way that society addresses the question "Who is indigenous?"

Download or read book Language Relations Across The Bering Strait written by Michael Fortescue and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1998-11-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In building up a scenario for the arrival on the shores of Alaska of speakers of languages related to Eskimo-Aleut with genetic roots deep within Sineria, this book touches upon a number of issues in contemporary historical linguistics and archaeology. The Arctic "gateway" to the New World, by acting as a bottleneck, has allowed only small groups of mobile hunter-gatherers through during specific propitious periods, and thus provides a unique testing ground for theories about population and language movements in pre-agricultural times. Owing to the historically attested prevalence of language shifts and other contact phenomena in the region, it is arguable that the spread of genes and the spread of language have been out of step since the earliest reconstructable times, contrary to certain views of their linkage. Proposals that have been put forward in the past concerning the affiliations of Eskimo-Aleut languages are followed up in the light of recent progress in reconstructing the proto-languages concerned. Those linking Eskimo-Aleut with the Uralic languages and Yukagir are particularly promising, and reconstructions for many common elements are presented. The entire region "Great Beringia" is scoured for typological evidence in the form of anomalies and constellations of uncommon traits diagnostic of affiliation or contact. The various threads lead back to mesolithic times in south central Siberia, when speakers of a "Uralo-Siberian" mesh of related languages appears to have moved along the major waterways of Siberia. Such a scenario would acount for the present distribution of these languages and the results of their meeting with remnants of earlier linguistic waves from the Old World to the New.

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 The Archaeology of Beringia written by Frederick Hadleigh West and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the ancient province of Beringia and its role in shaping the floristic and faunistic history of north western North America and Northeastern Siberia.

Download or read book Paleoecology of Beringia written by David M. Hopkins and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paleoecology of Beringia is the product of a symposium organized by its editors, sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and held at the foundation's conference center in Burg Wartenstein, Austria, 8-17 June 1979. The focus of this volume is on the paradox central to all studies of the unglaciated Arctic during the last Ice Age: that vertebrate fossils indicate that from 45,000 to 11,000 years BP an environment considerably more diverse and productive than the present one existed, whereas the botanical record, where it is not silent, supports a far more conservative appraisal of the region's ability to sustain any but the sparsest forms of plant and animal life. The volume is organized into seven parts. Part 1 focuses on the paleogeography of the Beringia. The studies in Part 2 explore the ancient vegatation. Part 3 deals with the steppe-tundra concept and its application in Beringia. Part 4 examines the paleoclimate while Part 5 is devoted to the biology of surviving relatives of the Pleistocene ungulates. Part 6 takes up the presence of man in ancient Beringia. Part 7 assesses the paleoecology of Beringia during the last 40,000 years

Download or read book First Peoples in a New World written by David J. Meltzer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America, a continent that was then truly a new world. Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology. This dazzling, cutting-edge synthesis, written for a wide audience by an archaeologist who has long been at the center of these debates, tells the scientific story of the first Americans: where they came from, when they arrived, and how they met the challenges of moving across the vast, unknown landscapes of Ice Age North America. David J. Meltzer pulls together the latest ideas from archaeology, geology, linguistics, skeletal biology, genetics, and other fields to trace the breakthroughs that have revolutionized our understanding in recent years. Among many other topics, he explores disputes over the hemisphere's oldest and most controversial sites and considers how the first Americans coped with changing global climates. He also confronts some radical claims: that the Americas were colonized from Europe or that a crashing comet obliterated the Pleistocene megafauna. Full of entertaining descriptions of on-site encounters, personalities, and controversies, this is a compelling behind-the-scenes account of how science is illuminating our past.

Download or read book The Last Giant of Beringia written by Daniel T. O'Neill and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 2004-05-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the work of geologist Dave Hopkins, whose research solved the mystery of the existence of Beringia, the Bering Land Bridge.

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 Across Atlantic Ice written by Dennis J. Stanford and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea and introduced the distinctive stone tools of the Clovis culture. Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge that narrative. Their hypothesis places the technological antecedents of Clovis technology in Europe, with the culture of Solutrean people in France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago, and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought."--Back cover.

Download or read book California Archaeology written by Michael J. Moratto and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 798 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California Archaeology provides a compilation of knowledge for archeologists who are not California specialists. This book explains important cultural events and patterns discovered archeologically. Organized into 11 chapters, this book begins with an overview of California's historic and ancient environments as well as the evidence of Pleistocene human activity. This text then examines the glacial and other environmental conditions that would have influenced the origins, adaptations, and spread of the earliest North Americans. Other chapters consider how California's past is relevant to a wider understanding of human behavior. This book discusses as well the perceptions of Central Coast and San Francisco Bay region prehistory that have changed rapidly as a result of intensive fieldwork performed to comply with environmental law. The final chapter deals with the data of historical linguistics, which indicate something of the cultural relationships and events that might have occurred in the past. This book is a valuable resource for archeologists.

Download or read book The Archaeology of Beringia written by Frederick H. West and published by . This book was released on with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: