Atlas of a Lost World
Travels in Ice Age America
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4.4 • 18 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Apocalyptic Planet comes a vivid travelogue through prehistory, that traces the arrival of the first people in North America at least twenty thousand years ago and the artifacts that tell of their lives and fates.
In Atlas of a Lost World, Craig Childs upends our notions of where these people came from and who they were. How they got here, persevered, and ultimately thrived is a story that resonates from the Pleistocene to our modern era. The lower sea levels of the Ice Age exposed a vast land bridge between Asia and North America, but the land bridge was not the only way across. Different people arrived from different directions, and not all at the same time.
The first explorers of the New World were few, their encampments fleeting. The continent they reached had no people but was inhabited by megafauna—mastodons, giant bears, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, five-hundred-pound panthers, enormous bison, and sloths that stood one story tall. The first people were hunters—Paleolithic spear points are still encrusted with the proteins of their prey—but they were wildly outnumbered and many would themselves have been prey to the much larger animals.
Atlas of a Lost World chronicles the last millennia of the Ice Age, the violent oscillations and retreat of glaciers, the clues and traces that document the first encounters of early humans, and the animals whose presence governed the humans’ chances for survival. A blend of science and personal narrative reveals how much has changed since the time of mammoth hunters, and how little. Across unexplored landscapes yet to be peopled, readers will see the Ice Age, and their own age, in a whole new light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this captivating travelogue, Childs (Apocalyptic Planet) treads the late Ice Age with the first migrants to the Americas adventurous and canny explorers who traveled amid disappearing glaciers and "a cycle of animals of all sizes from voles and falcons to some of the largest mammals seen in human evolution." The first human inhabitants of North America likely crossed a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska some 30,000 years ago, and Childs follows their path down the coast of California, across to Texas and Colorado, and as far as Florida. The migrants not only left their tools and weapons of survival behind, but mysteries, too: "How got to Florida no one knows," whether they came down the Atlantic coast or "somehow across the Pacific," he writes. Childs's walk-in-their-shoes account takes on pinpointing "the world's most contentious prehistoric problems" how and where humans came to the Americas. The evidence suggests, however, they "came along multiple routes and at different times, before, during, and after the height of the Ice Age," he writes. With simple, beautiful sketches by fellow traveler Gilman, Childs's account will fire the imagination of ordinary readers as well as anthropologists and prehistorians.
