America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

Until very recently there was almost universal agreement amongst scientists that human beings first entered the Americas from Siberia around 13,000 years ago by walking into Alaska across the Bering landbridge. Over the next two thousand years their descendants supposedly spread out through Central and South America reaching the southern tip of Chile by about 11,000 years ago. Meanwhile the Ice Age ended, sea level rose, the Bering landbridge was submerged and the Americas were isolated from the rest of the world.

Largely on account of this consensus there has not been a single serious attempt in modern scholarship to investigate the possibility that the Americas might have played an important part in the still incomplete story of human origins, or in the equally incomplete story of the origins of civilization.

Thanks to scientific advances, and to archaeological and geological discoveries made in the past five years, we now know that the Americas were populated by hum