Who were the first Americans? Where did they come from, when did they get here, what was their culture like and how did they settle North and South America?

Until a few years ago, we knew the answers. The first Americans crossed over what is now the Bering Strait from Siberia about 12,000 years ago, when glaciers still covered most of North America. A restless, nomadic people who organized their technology and lifeways around the hunt, they stormed through the hemisphere, reaching Tierra del Fuego in perhaps as little as five hundred years. They left spectacular evidence behind: collections of dozens of skeletons of extinct mammals, mingled with the large, deadly, ingeniously made stone spear-points, called Clovis points, that gave their name to these people -- the Clovis People.

The main trouble with this compellingly romantic vision is that it is largely false. The Clovis people, while they certainly existed, were not the first ones here. So who were the real first Americans?

No scientist has done more to demonstrate the need for new thinking on this question than Thomas Dillehay. The Monte Verde site in southern Chile, which his team excavated from 1977 until 1989, is now widely accepted as the first proven "pre-Clovis" site -- a human New World settlement that is at least 15,000 and perhaps as much as 30,000 years old. This demands more than simple revision of the dates: our entire picture of where these first settlers came from, how they lived, and their relationship with their new environment must change.

That new view, says Dillehay, will come mainly from South America -- from South American sites and from freedom from the North American dogma that kept the Clovis theory dominant for so many years. In The Settlement of the Americas he not only tours the relevant sites and describes the routes the first Americans might have taken into this hemisphere, he also describes how they must have lived and how they faced the great adventure of exploring a completely uninhabited continent -- the last people on earth to have this experience. This is the first book on the new prehistory of the Pleistocene New World.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas D. Dillehay is T. Marshall Hahn, Jr., Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He was the Principal Investigator at the Monte Verde site in Chile and has also carried out extensive archaeological research in the eastern United States, the Great Plains, Peru, Argentina, and Uruguay.