Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America

In this captivating travelogue, Childs (Apocalyptic Planet) treads 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 [the first people] 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. (May)