Who were the first Americans and where did they come from? The conventional view is that ancient big-game hunters entered the Americas across the Bering land bridge - a strip of dry land that spanned the Bering Strait between Asia and Alaska during the last Ice Age some 12,000 years ago. But in recent years, a wave of startling discoveries has overturned that idea. The first Americans almost certainly came thousands of years earlier, traveling in skin boats and living off sea mammals along the edge of the ice. Now a truly provocative theory has stirred a storm of disbelief and argument among archaeologists. A leading prehistorian at the Smithsonian Institution claims that some of these first canoe-borne migrants came not from Asia but Europe, and that they crossed the Atlantic in skin boats by following the fringes of the ice sheets. This Stone Age detective story reveals that the peopling of the Americas is a far more tantalizing riddle than anyone had ever suspected.

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