How? Crossing the open Atlantic would have posed a perhaps insurmountable challenge, even though people traveled in boats from southern Asia to Australia at least 40,000 years ago. "We don't give early people enough credit," says Stanford. "Yeah, they lived in caves—but they were pretty smart, too." Smart enough, perhaps, to have navigated along the ice sheet and seasonal pack ice that spanned the ocean from England to Nova Scotia. "They could have made it if they worked the glacier for seals and water birds," says Johnson. "They would have seen migratory birds flying west; they would have known there was land in that direction." Similarly, the Asians who reached America from the West may have been seafarers, too.
Deep in the craggy uplands 450 feet above the Amazon, the people of Caverna da Pedra Pintada look
nothing like the stereotype of the First Americans as bison-fur-wearing big-game hunters. This band
drew sustenance from the river and the forest, dining on turtles, frogs, snakes, fish and fresh-water
mussels, as well as Brazil nuts and palm nuts.
And they did more.
The cave floor is splattered with gobs of red and yellow iron-based paint, dripped 11,000 years ago.
The Stone Age artists created exuberant scenes of snakes and other animals and even handprints—
designs? signatures?—including children's.
"We are rewriting the textbooks on the First Americans," says Stanford.
The new edition will show that "the peopling of the Americas was never as simple as simple-minded paradigms said."
Instead, it will tell of an America that beckoned to far-flung people long before the Mayflower or the Santa Maria or the Viking ships, of an unknown continent so alluring that men and women endowed with a technology no more sophisticated than sharp rocks braved Siberian tundra and Atlantic ice packs to get here.
It is still the New World.
But it is thousands of years older than we thought—home to settlers so diverse that it was, even millenniums ago, the world's melting pot.
http://www.abotech.com/Articles/firstamericans.htm