Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs

[King Bob]

The author travels to various archaelogical sites around where there was  human activity in the Paleolithic. It's the usual his travels plus the history kind of book. I was interested because back when I took physical anthro in 1982 or so, the earliest dates were around 10,000 BCE. They knew there had to be earlier settlements, because those dates were over North and South America, but none had been found. They have pushed that back between 2 and 10,000 years now. There is a 200K year old site where mammoth bones appear to have been shattered by human activity, but there is nothing there that definitively proves humans were there. And it now seems likely that it wasn't the land bridge from Eurasia that was the main route - at the North American end, there was only a little land not covered by glaciers - but along the coast; at that time it would have been kelp forest all the way, so plenty to eat. (He talked to a modern day kayaker who traveled on a whim from Alaska to Chile along the coast, taking two years of leisurely travel, so it's doable. Also the land bridge would have ended

He talks some about different stone tool technologies, the Beringian (coming from Eurasia) and the later Clovis and Folsom technologies appearing in North America, but there is also at least one site in Florida where they have found points worked in the Solutrean style used at that time in Spain. One researcher believes they may have followed migrating auks across the Atlantic. Others discount that.

He occasionally gets a little carried away IMO with imagining past scenes, but I got used to that as the book went on. Amusingly, he winds up at a site near Black Rock, and Burning Man was setting up while he was there.

Recommended it you are interested in the subject - I haven't been able to find any other books about it, and this one read easily.