The Settlement of the Americas
Subtitle: A New Prehistory
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: May 2, 2000
Language: eng
Number of pages: 371
ISBN-13: 9780465076680
First sentence: SOMETIME AFTER THE EMERGENCE OF Homo sapiens in the Old World, the forebears of Native Americans entered the previously uninhabited New World, eventually making their way southward to the cold, barren landscape of Tierra del Fuego-one of the last places on earth reached by prehistoric humans.
Description: "The Clovis people, while they certainly existed, were not the first ones here. So who were the real first Americans?".

"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 a 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."--BOOK JACKET.