Kind of a tough book to rate. Decently informative, but the tenor was often offputting.

To explain, some background. I'm a leftist who has read multiple books on CRT and think it has some good things to say but isn't perfect or totally close. Related? I don't think that everything nutters call "woke" is wrong. But I do think some things are.

And woke, the good, the bad and the ugly all run deep in this book.

I was "triggered," if you will, by something in the introduction. She talked about some Native Americans who believe "we've always been here." I knew, confirmed by footnote, she was referencing Vine Deloria. Along with that, she talked about "Indigenous science," setting it, in cases like this, against "Western science," and saying that she wasn't here to resolve these conflicts. Well, I've called out Deloria elsewhere. And, science has had its failures, ethical and otherwise. (I already knew about the Havasupai DNA testing.)

One or two digressions wouldn't be bad, but the book has a sidebar every 8-10 pages and half of them or nearly so are related to this.

==

OK, the actual informative parts.

I knew that Clovis was dead a full decade or more ago. But, how far back do we go before that? Raff has pretty solid DNA evolutionary evidence that humans were in the west end of Beringeria, modern Alaska, 25K years ago, before the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum. Like other recent research, she notes that traveling by boat would have worked around the ice sheets.

The White Sands footprint? She'd seen pre-print research by the scientists. Says the dating seems solid. So, humans were in the US Southwest by 25K years ago. Problem? Almost zero anthropological evidence in Alaska. For various reasons, we may never get a lot more. There is some in Eastern Siberia that goes older than that.

Next, based on DNA and other evidence, she talks about multiple waves of immigration, beyond what we know as a separate wave of Inuit and Aleut. Ties this to linguistics, noting that Greenberg and other "clumpers" are wrong.

New to me is that Clovis people apparently migrated north, from US South or Southeast, after development of Clovis toolkit. Lists a site in Florida that sheds further information on this.

For people who don't know that Clovis is dead, or that humans were likely in the Americas not just 15K years ago but 20-25K, this book would be reasonably informative. If you DO know that, there won't be a lot new here.