Synopses & Reviews
The recent discoveries of 9000-12000 year old skeletal remains in the Americas have begun to change our understanding of who originally entered the Americas at the end of the last Ice Age. Discoveries such as Washington state's 'Kennewick Man', Brazil's 'Luzia', and Alaska's 'Prince of Wales Island Man' have challenged the archaeological and geological status quo. The First Americans explores these new discoveries by using racial classifications and micro-evolutionary techniques to better understand the complex relationships between the first Americans and living Native Indian groups.
Review
...this book effectively summarizes the skeletal and archaeological evidence concerning the initial peopling of the American landmass.
Choice
Synopsis
Challenges traditional ideas of who the first Americans were and what their relationship with living Native American Indians is.
About the Author
Joseph Powell is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. He has published extensively on the skeletal and dental remains of Paleoindian peoples, and was a lead scientist for the US Federal government investigation of the 'Kennewick Man' skeleton.
Table of Contents
Prologue: The Kennewick Controversy; Part I. Race and Variation: 1. Debating the origins of Native Americans; 2. A brief history of race; 3. Evolutionary approaches to human variation; 4. Recent population variation in the Americas; Part II. The Pleistocene Peopling of America: 5. The Pleistocene and Ice-Age environments; 6. Ancient cultures and migration to the Americas; 7. Kennewick Man and his contemporaries; 8. Human variation in the Pleistocene; Part III. The First Americans, Race and Evolution: 9. Racial models of Native American origins; 10. Evolutionary models of Native American origins; 11. The first Americans: Native American origins; Bibliography.