ABSTRACT
BIOLOGICALLY MODERN HUMANS HAVE ROAMED the earth for tens of thousands of years, but it was not until around 14 millennia ago that a trickle of humanity leaked across the land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska. Small human populations expanded from Siberia to North America, where they slowly multiplied, expanded, and eventually spread to all corners of the American continents. Like people everywhere at the time these earliest of all Americans were huntergatherers, but from that time forward their histories diverged from the rest of the earth’s peoples. Their descendants lived in almost complete isolation from the rest of humanity until a mere five centuries ago, yet
the trajectory of their long independent cultural evolution in the Americas paralleled those of other peoples on other continents. That this should be so is at once surprising and reassuring (Figure 1.1).
