The First Americans
Race, Evolution and the Origin of Native Americans

Challenges traditional ideas of who the first Americans were and what their relationship with living Native American Indians is.

Joseph F. Powell (Author)

9780521530354, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 6 October 2005

280 pages, 31 b/w illus. 4 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.455 kg

' … an interesting and provocative standpoint and an enrichment of the general debate.' Journal of Comparative Human Biology

Who were the first Americans? What is their relationship to living native peoples in the Americas? What do their remains tell us of the current concepts of racial variation, and short-term evolutionary change and adaptation. The recent discoveries in the Americas of the 9000-12000 year old skeletons such as 'Kennewick Man' in Washington State, 'Luzia' in Brazil and 'Prince of Wales Island Man' in Alaska have begun to challenge our understanding of who first entered the Americas at the end of the last Ice Age. New archaeological and geological research is beginning to change the hypothesis of land bridge crossings and the extinction of ancient animals. The First Americans explores these questions by using racial classifications and microevolutionary techniques to better understand who colonized the Americas and how. It will be required reading for all those interested in anthropology, and the history and archaeology of the earliest Americans.

Prologue: The Kennewick Controversy
Part I. Race and Variation: 1. Debating the origins of Native Americans
2. A brief history of race
3. Evolutionary approaches to human variation
4. Recent population variation in the Americas
Part II. The Pleistocene Peopling of America: 5. The Pleistocene and Ice-Age environments
6. Ancient cultures and migration to the Americas
7. Kennewick Man and his contemporaries
8. Human variation in the Pleistocene
Part III. The First Americans, Race and Evolution: 9. Racial models of Native American origins
10. Evolutionary models of Native American origins
11. The first Americans: Native American origins
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Human biology [PSX], Physical anthropology [JHMP], Anthropology [JHM]