Where did the First People come from?  Who were they?  What did they find when they arrived here?  Atlas of a Lost World seeks to answer these questions in a startlingly vivid, ruminative and personal journey through prehistory. Tracing the arrival of the First People in North America and the distant animals and landscapes they would have encountered, Childs takes us to back in time to fully imagine their lives and fates.

Scientists squabble over the locations and dates for human arrival in the New World; the first explorers were few, and encampments fleeting.  But at some point between twenty and forty thousand years ago sea levels were low enough that a vast land bridge was exposed between Asia and North America, called Beringia. At the same time, the First People may have been on the move through other ways—evidence has emerged of a seafaring people, moving down the Pacific coast by boat. Over millennia, these early people spread across the continent, and remains of their ancient settlements have been found from Alaska to New Mexico, Florida and Pennsylvania.

The unpeopled continent they reached was inhabited by megafauna—mastodons, sloths, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, lions, bison and enormous bears, far larger than the ones we know today. The First People were both predators and prey, effective hunters (Paleolithic spear points are still encrusted with the protein of their kills) who were also wildly outnumbered and at the mercy of dangerous and much larger animals. Childs reflects on the relationship early humans had to their environment, as one species among many, fighting for survival—a relationship with nature we can hardly imagine today.

About the Author

Craig Childs is known for following ancient migration routes on foot, pursuing early Pueblo passages across the Southwest and most recently the paths of first peoples into the Americas during the Ice Age. He has published more than a dozen books of adventure, wilderness, and science. His new book, Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America, examines the dynamics of people moving into an uninhabited hemisphere in the late Pleistocene, documenting arrivals from Alaska to Florida to southern Chile. He has won the Orion Book Award and has twice won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, and the Spirit of the West Award for his body of work. He is contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men's Journal and Outside. The New York Times says "Childs's feats of asceticism are nothing if not awe inspiring: he's a modern-day desert father." An occasional commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, he teaches writing at University of Alaska in Anchorage and the Mountainview MFA at Southern New Hampshire University.

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