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

4.0

Lifelike descriptions of extinct creatures and long gone ecosystems are rather lovely and enjoyable. He combines them with his real life adventure travel experiences, anthropological data on hunter-gatherers and archaeological evidence to discuss what ancient North America might have been like. How fast could a band of hunter gatherers migrate the whole west coast of the Americas? Somewhere between 2 and 2000 years. Tales of his adventure travels - ocean kayaking and cross glacial expeditions in Alaska, backpacking in Nevada, playing bison in the sand dunes of New Mexico, kayaking the swamps of the South - are nicely interspersed with an analysis of the inhabitants that would have lived in the area during the last ice age. He describes what we know from stone tools and bones of both the human and animal inhabitants of the country. He describes the various migration theories, and the evidence, and discusses possible reasons for these patterns with an open acknowledgement of how little we know about these ancestors. He describes historic megafauna as if they are present, and the territory in which they lived. He describes the groups he travels with, who is exploring where and how, and whether perhaps there's a genetic drive to adventure - and uses all these modern people as a lens to examine the first Americans.

He narrates the audiobook well and it's overall a fun book - gotten from the SF Public Library and the Libby app for Android.