"Kathleen O' Neal & Michael W. Gear - People 3 - People Of The Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Neal Kathleen)

critique we've ever had on a manuscript. Good editors are hard to
find, and, Harriet, you're one of the best. To Linda Quinton, Debby
Tobias, and Ralph Arnote: Thanks for everything, you are the best in
the business. Tom Doherty, Heather Wood and the superb team at Tor
Books did the rest.

And special thanks to Don and Patty Woerz for last minute rescues.
FOREWORD

In the novel People of the Wolf we discussed the retreat of the last
glaciation around fifteen thousand years ago and the migration of the
first Native Americans into the virgin continent of North America. Over
the following millennia, the climate grew progressively warmer and
dryer. These increasingly xeric (hot and dry) conditions restricted
the range of large game animals and this, coupled with human predation
and environmental stress, drove many game species such as giant sloth,
horse, and camel to extinction. By seven thousand years ago, the
interior of North America was locked in a drought known to pre
historians as the Altithermal. The second novel in the series, People
of the Fire, is set in this period, when bands of human hunters turned
increasingly to the collection of plant resources.

Exploitation of the environment appears to have become specialized
during the Altithermal. Recent archaeological discoveries that have
occurred as a result of increased energy development and federal
cultural-resource protection have uncovered a wealth of new
information. Among the more exciting discoveries, researchers have
excavated the remains of earthen structures which indicate that some
human groups may have restricted their range, becoming semi nomadic and
basing their subsistence on intensive utilization of plant and animal
resources in a given locale. The appearance of such structures
fifty-five hundred years ago (four thousand years before their
Southwestern Basketmaker counterparts) has reoriented our understanding
of the Early Archaic. Where once we thought that Early Archaic peoples
lived on the ragged
edge of starvation, we now know they used their environment to an
extent perhaps unequaled in the archaeological record.

Sometime in the last five thousand years, a major group of people
spread across the western portion of North America. Today we know
these people by the similarities of their language: Uto-Aztecan. In
People of the Earth, we've placed the southward migration of
Uto-Aztecan peoples at the end of the Early Archaic period.

Perhaps the most frequently asked question about our prehistory books
is: "Did people really talk like that?" The general perception that
our prehistoric forebears were grunting savages is widespread. It
comes largely from movies that portray Native American tribes as semi
human barbarians who speak in half-sentences. The image is quite
simply false. Our best linguistic theories, which search all