More than 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America, a continent that was then truly a new world. Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology. This dazzling, cutting-edge synthesis, written for a wide audience by an archaeologist who has long been at the center of these debates, tells the scientific story of the first Americans: where they came from, when they arrived, and how they met the challenges of moving across the vast, unknown landscapes of Ice Age North America. David J. Meltzer pulls together the latest ideas from archaeology, geology, linguistics, skeletal biology, genetics, and other fields to trace the breakthroughs that have revolutionized our understanding in recent years. Among many other topics, he explores disputes over the hemisphere's oldest and most controversial sites and considers how the first Americans coped with changing global climates. He also confronts some radical claims: that the Americas were colonized from Europe or that a crashing comet obliterated the Pleistocene megafauna. Full of entertaining descriptions of on-site encounters, personalities, and controversies, this is a compelling behind-the-scenes account of how science is illuminating our past.

Preface Acknowledgments 1. Overture On Dates and Dating 2. The Landscape of Colonization: Glaciers, Climates, and Environments of Ice Age North America The Younger Dryas: It Came from Outer Space? 3. From Paleoliths to Paleoindians A Mammoth Fraud in Science 4. The Pre-Clovis Controversy and Its Resolution A Visit to Monte Verde 5. Non-archaeological Answers to Archaeological Questions And Then There Was Kennewick 6. American Origins: The Search for Consensus Looking for Clovis in All the Wrong Places 7. What Do You Do When No One's Been There Before? 8. Clovis Adaptations and Pleistocene Extinctions Is Overkill Dead? 9. Settling In: Late Paleoindians and the Waning Ice Age Back to Folsom 10. When Past and Present Collide Further Reading Notes References Index Plates