It was about 13,000 years ago that the First Americans, people who came from Asia, worked their way past the melting glaciers of the last Ice Age and began spreading across North, Central, and South America – lands previously unscarred by humans and teeming with mammoths, giant bison, saber-toothed tigers, and beavers the size of a cow. But it’s only recently that scientists have pieced together … together the elusive, compelling saga of that epic migration. And the more we learn about them, the more we must marvel at the courage, adaptability, enterprise, and enduring resilience of the First Americans.Most of us know little about the early Americans and the wonders they achieved. Some of them learned to hunt forty-ton whales from dugout canoes; others built a vast system of canals that irrigated crops on tens of thousands of acres. Fully a thousand years before the pyramids at Giza went up, people on the Mississippi River were constructing even larger pyramidal earthworks, and later, a thousand miles to the north, others built a city that would remain the largest in North America until after the Revolutionary War. In the cradle of civilization that evolved in Central America, the Olmecs, Mayans, and Aztecs built complex cultures and dazzling cities whose monumental structures and works of art still have the power to awe and inspire.This book describes the peopling of North and Central America and examine their amazing societies – the farmers and cliff-dwellers of the Southwest United States, the mound-builders of the Midwest, the Northwest Coast whale-hunters with their potlatches and totem poles, and the mighty, gods-driven cultures of Mesoamerica. It is a saga as breathtaking as it is surprising.
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I found this book very interesting. The ingenuity of these early Americans really makes you wonder, if we’re so smart after all! I generally am not a huge history fan, but this was great!
This should have been more entertaining than it was , but unfortunately the author is a better scholar than a writer.
This short e-book provides an overview of the settlement of the Americas by the indigenous peoples. It spends quite a bit of time discussing how early man in the Americas could have arrived over the Bering Land Bridge, but spends only one paragraph to dismiss the possibility that early man could have come here via the Atlantic, especially from the Solutrean area in Spain. Otherwise, it is an excellent introduction to the subject of the First Americans.
Too much conjecture. Too much like a text book.
Not in depth, but a fairly good overview of the early Americans. I learned a lot about the people wandering and settling in No. America.
This book takes us back to the Conqiustodors’ conquests of the first peoples of our continent of the USA. So worth a read to discover the the very early days of invaders destroying the hopes and lives if the first people. Shows compassion famong the first people trying to survive.
Good book very informative held my attention
The introduction alone should be essential reading for all. Especially those who have a picture of murderous savages of the indigenous population of the Americas. The book is well written, informative without condescension and displays up-to-date research and fascinating facts.
Although of a serious nature the book is an easy read and accessible to a non-specialist interested in Man’s origins. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the symbiotic relationship of man and beast. No hesitation in recommending this book.
I think the author did a very good job of researching this book. It’s extremely interesting.
I lived in Colorado and near there. If you haven’t gone down and gone to see it , I would say go and see it.
I can only give this a 3 rating because it possibly will bring some of this history to some people’s attention. I personally expected much more from it. None of the topics were treated with any of the detailed inspection they deserved. It would have been far better if the author had chosen to cover only a single topic and give that the in-depth attention it deserved. That would have kept my attention much more than this cursory skim across the surface .
informative. accessible.
Very complex a lot of info in a short time
Informative book but rather dry
As a habitual history reader, I thought this might be interesting, but I could not finish it. Perhaps I was more interested in the peoples that first inhabited America, but this book had more the flavor of an archeological dig than an exploration of the peoples and their lives. Lots of detail on stone points and tools they used, which maybe if you’re a scientist, is mostly what the author had to go on.
Very up to date information
Covers a subject with which I was unfamiliar. Very informative and well written.
Interesting survey.
broadened my knowledge of American history
Very informative book about Native Americans and how they arrived in the New World, the societies they developed in different parts of North and South America, and how those societies were decimated by climate changes or foreign invaders. Most societies were successful for centuries, but some just seemed to fade away to nothing. The Maya of Mexico and Central America left their large cities and disappeared into the jungle, but there is still a very large Mayan population in that region today. I really enjoyed this book.