The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World (Wattis Symposium Series in Anthropology)

As modern humans spread around the globe, the Americas represented the final continental frontier. These first colonists were modern in appearance and technology, but who were they and when did they arrive? Traditional answers to these questions have come under increasing scrutiny in the face of new findings from artifacts, skeletal remains, genes, and languages. The peopling of the Americas has become one of archaeology's most compelling and contentious subjects, as these new lines of evidence reveal a more complex solution. In this volume, distinguished scientists from the fields of archaeology, physical anthropology, paleoecology, genetics, and linguistics assess the latest evidence from Siberia to Chile and offer provocative ideas for how, when, and where humans entered the Americas.

Contributors: Bruce Bradley, Linda Brown, Scott A. Elias, Tom D. Dillehay, John Douglas, Jon M. Erlandson, Nina G. Jablonski, David J. Meltzer, D. Andrew Merriwether, Johanna Nichols, Joseph F. Powell, Anna C. Roosevelt, Jack Rossen, Dennis Stanford, D. Gentry Steele, Christy G. Turner II

Distributed for the California Academy of Sciences

Nina G. Jablonski is Irvine Chair and Curator of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences. She coedited Beyond Art: Pleistocene Image and Symbol (1997) and The Origin and Diversification of Language (1998), California.