Scientists not so long ago unanimously believed that people first walked to the New World from northeast Asia across the Bering land bridge at the end of the Ice Age 11,000 years ago. But in the last ten years, new tools applied to old bones have yielded evidence that tells an entirely different story.In Bones, Elaine Dewar records the ferocious struggle in the scientific world to reshape our views of prehistory. She traveled from the Mackenzie River valley in northern Canada to the arid plains of the Brazilian state of Piaui, from the skull-and-bones-lines offices of the Smithsonian Institution to the basement lab of an archaeologist in Washington State who wondered if the FBI was going to come for him. She met scientists at war with each other and sought to see for herself the oldest human remains on these continents. Along the way, she found that the old answer to the question of who were the First Americans was steeped in the bitter tea of racism.Bones explores the ambiguous terrain left behind when a scientific paradigm is swept away. It tells the stories of the archaeologists, Native American activists, DNA experts and physical anthropologists scrambling for control of ancient bones of Kennewick Man, Spirit Cave, and the oldest one of all, a woman named Luzia. At stake are professional reputations, lucrative grants, fame, vindication, even the reburial of wandering spirits. The weapons? Lawsuits, threats, violence. The battlefield stretches from Chile to Alaska.Dewar tells the stories that never find their way into scientific papers — stories of mysterious deaths, of the bones of evil shamen and the shadows falling on the lives of scientists who pulled them from the ground. And she asks the new questions arising out of the science of bones and the stories of first peoples: "What if Native Americans are right in their belief that they have always been in the Americas and did not migrate to the New World at the end of the Ice Age? What if the New World's human story is as long and complicated as that of the Old? What if the New World and the Old World have always been one?"

ContentsIntroductionPart One1 Asian Origins? • Clovis First Across the Bering Strait2 Bones 101 • A Sordid History Begets a Compromised Science3 Found and Lost • The Misplaced Remains of the Accepted Path4 The Battle for Monte Verde • Rewriting the First American Story?by Committee5 The Founding Mothers • The Spectral Trail of Mitochondrial DNA6 Virtual Bones • Are Reburied Remains Hard Evidence?7 The Kennewick Chronicles • Science, History, Politics, Religion . . . and the United States Army8 Excavating the Museum Shelves • Weaving a New Image of Ancient Americans9 We were Always Here • Some Native American Histories10 Pendejo Cave • Indiana Jones Digs Down to the FoundationPart Two11 Beneath the Southern Cross • The Road Leads Back in Time12 Lunch with Luzia • The Fine African Features of the Oldest Woman in the Americas13 Proof Parasite • A Wormhole in the Bering Strait Theory14 Revisionist Prehistory • Bones Beyond the Bounds of Accepted Theory15 Brazilian Edens • The Sheltered Finds of Minas Gerais16 Science Contender • Dispatches from the Most Ancient Trenches17 Pedra Furada • Ancient Arts of the Little People Part Three18 Science under Fire • The Inquisition of Karl Reinhard19 The Kennewick Shuffle • Dancing Around the Hard Questions20 The Reverse Migration • North, by Boat21 The Corridor That Wasn't • The Cold Facts Behind the Absence of Evidence22 Hard Science, Hardball Politics • Kennewick Reevaluated23 Going Home • Burying the Bones, Treasuring the PastEpilogueAcknowledgementsEndnotesBibliographyIndex