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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.
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.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the bookPROLOGUE
Nothing stirred in the bowels of the earth. Bones lay on bones in silence, a cave sealed shut, its entrance collapsed in the middle of the Pleistocene, the last geologic epoch before our own. Anything stuck inside never got out. The first inkling of new life was the white light of a headlamp and the scratch of small metal tools.
I lay on my side with my hard hat off, working on a camel that had died back here, an awkward place for anything to die, I thought. It was in a crack in the back side of a small chamber, which is why they gave the site to me. I was in my early thirties, base camp cook for a museum crew working on one of the most prolific Pleistocene bone-producing sites in the American West—Porcupine Cave in the mountains of south-central Colorado—churning out rodent bones for the most part, with the occasional hoorah of discovering skeletal cheetah kittens, the toe bones of horses, cores of bison horns. Elsewhere, a dozen excavators and screeners were pulling up a treasure trove of Pleistocene porcupines and squirrels, filling and labeling bags, while I was alone in a hole with Camelops hesternus. I imagined the camel crawling into the cave, its hindquarters slashed by sabertooths or hamstrung by dire wolves, trying to save itself, dying here.
When silver miners first blasted into the mountainside in the 1860s, they accidentally clipped one of the cave’s chambers. So they propped up the tunnel with wooden posts and beams. Then they dropped into it with their oil-wick lamps and found passageways, crystals, and domed rooms—floors buried in dust, bones sealed in place three hundred thousand years ago. Now, a ladder brought paleontologists down through the hole the miners opened. They moved through the rotten molasses smell of woodrat urine into the dark, crawling through low spots, pushing gear ahead, headlamps shining on each other’s boot soles. They went to their own trenches and pits, screens and vacuums, setting up grids, fingers picking through countless rodent bones. I went to the camel.
***
“Is it safe for idiots?” I asked.
“None of this is safe for idiots,” said David Stevenson, my friend and mentor, a soul-brother who would turn sixty while we were out on the ice. He said this as we looked across an empty expanse of mountains and glaciers, nothing but rock and whiteness before us.
A mountaineering author and book review editor for the American Alpine Journal, Stevenson was the de facto leader of our group of five heading for the Harding Icefield, one of the largest remaining ice masses in North America. He and I had taken a few quick trips and mountain climbs in the Chugach Range outside his home in Anchorage, finding good company with each other, enough to plan this venture. Stevenson was here to ascend his first nunatak, an Icelandic word for a mountain summit stabbed through ice, a castle of rock completely isolated. It was on his bucket list, and the Harding has plenty. Stevenson and I assembled a small ice- crossing tribe, carrying rope, sleds, skis, and gear on the first load a few thousand feet into the mountains at the edge of the Harding, a giant glacier poured like latex into the crown of the Kenai Mountains. The neck of a ukulele poked out of the top of my pack, gift of a woman we met at the trailhead on the freshly snowed valley floor. None of us knew how to play the instrument, but we brought it anyway. With a pack weight of around eighty pounds each, what’s the difference? Going into the unknown, talismans might come in handy. It...
About the Author-
CRAIG CHILDS is the author of Apocalyptic Planet. He has been a regular commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Men's Journal, Outside, The Sun, and Orion Magazine. Awards he has received include the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, the Rowell Award for the Art of Adventure, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, and, for his body of work, the 2003 Spirit of the West Award.
Reviews-
Starred review from February 19, 2018 In this captivating travelogue, Childs (Apocalyptic Planet) trods 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.
April 1, 2018
In his latest work, Childs (The Apocalyptic Planet; House of Rain) visits key archaeological sites in North America in an attempt to understand how humans first arrived and expanded across the Americas. Childs explores sites associated with the Bering Land Bridge, which permitted, many experts contend, people from Asia to cross into what is now Alaska. He also investigates how evidence of Solutrean physical culture from prehistoric Europe is littered throughout North America and thus offers an alternate and possibly coinciding theory of an Atlantic crossing. While these theories of migration have existed and been debated for decades, what draws readers in is Childs's approach of actually going to the sites and speaking with researchers. His visit to a modern-day flintknapper in Utah reveals the humanity that went into producing a useful projectile point. Included are imaginative re-creations of the daunting challenges the first arrivals faced, in the form of a frigid and inhospitable climate paired with rapacious megafauna. VERDICT A very engaging read that allows readers a real glimpse into the prehistoric world; Childs ably transforms archaeological theories into relatable concepts.--Brian Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from March 15, 2018 Childs (Apocalyptic Planet, 2012) takes readers on a scintillating dual journey through the geography of modern and Ice Age America in this survey of some of the lands reached by the first voyagers across the Bering Sea Ice Bridge. With fully half the book set in Alaska, Childs provides a fascinating mash-up of scientific history and present-day travelogue as he journeys across the state's various regions, surveying the land; visiting with scientists and Native scholars; and seeking out the place where anthropology, archaeology, and cultural history meet. While exploring the American West and ultimately embarking on a trip in a north Florida swamp, Childs maintains a self-deprecating humor and a boundless enthusiasm for his subject that makes this narrative an unexpected page-turner. His curiosity is infectious, and the lessons he learns about how Ice Age people lived, what we can learn from them, and who they became resonate with serious staying power. These first people, Tlingit writer Ernestine Hayes tells him, were not becoming Americans, but becoming Tlingit, becoming Navajo, becoming Lakota. Childs has found history deeper than politics, and in rich, evocative prose, he makes it startlingly relevant to readers. A science title with broad and enduring appeal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
Starred review from March 15, 2018 Scenarios of glacial and postglacial environments in the Americas.Toward the end of the last glaciation, when there was still a land bridge between what was to become Siberia and Alaska, humanoids started to migrate from northeast Asia across the bridge and into the Americas--right? Not so fast. As Childs (Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth, 2012, etc.) points out in this useful and transporting tour d'horizon of the prehistoric Americas, that theory has lost its authority despite its continued usage. In chapters that hopscotch around in time--45,000 years ago, 13,000, 20,000, etc.--and geography (the Bering Sea to Florida), the author brings readers to prehistoric sites, pointing out where artifacts have been found. He presents each site like a diorama, describing what it would have looked like eons ago, what animals would have roamed the land, and what flora would have been available to eat or to fashion as clothing or a boat. "First people," he writes, "wildly outnumbered by animals, would have found themselves tossed and trampled by tusks and hooves or torn to pieces by the scissoring teeth of scimitar cats." Throughout the text, Childs projects a high degree of infectious fascination, pulling readers into his prehistoric scenes. Readers will be impressed by his hardiness as he attempts to experience what an ancient traveler may have experienced. Some of the boats and other conveyances are still used today by far northerners, including the "umiaq, the traditional skin boat...made out of walrus skins stitched together around a wooden frame, eyelets cut through the inch-thick hide and secured with rope." The author backs up his theses with the latest in archaeological research, and he is clearly thrilled when he hits on some new nugget of information.A tight weave of professional findings, anecdotes, site visits, and explanations behind ancient artifacts make this book both engaging and indispensable for those with an interest in prehistory.
COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
David J. Meltzer, The Wall Street Journal
"It's a clever, smartly written and altogether enthusiastic effort to breathe feeling and life into the human processes behind all those ancient sites, artifacts, and busted animal bones. The past is a country to which one cannot return, but "Atlas of a Lost World" at least helps you imagine what you might be missing."
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