THE LOST AMERICANS [SOLD]

THE LOST AMERICANS by Frank C. Hibben

Illustrated by John De Grasse

Publisher: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, New York

Hardback, first edition 1946, second printing October 1946.

Red fabric board cover with gold illustration of a hand and spear

Preface

Columbus was not the first one to see these lands that we call America, nor, indeed, were those intrepid Vikings, who even earlier battled the North Atlantic seas to make a landfall on the rough Labrador coasts that we called Vineland.  Nor were even the Indians.  Human eyes had seen the shadowed mountains of this American continent long before the Santa Maria brought Columbus to the Caribbean.  We are only beginning to suspect how many thousands of years ago that was.

The first authentic human being to have his tracks in the mud of this world is a stranger to us.  Indeed, until the late 1920s, it was never even suspected that such a discoverer had been here at all.  But a series of scientific accidents and discoveries have rolled back the mists of obscurity which covered these early beginnings.  We now have incontrovertible proof that men lived here and hunted the mammoth and the mastodon in times that we can truly call ancient.

Antiquity itself is a magic word.  Every visitor who watches an archaeologist exhuming a skeleton asks the inevitable question, “How old?”  More than anything else we wish to know our antecedents.  Who were the first ones?  And tumbling after this query, in a stream of human interest and enthusiasm, come the corollary questions, “What did they look like?” and “What happened to them?”

The question of the day is, “Who were the earliest Americans?” Scientists have assured us that man did not begin in North or South America.  There is no need to search for the Garden of Eden in the jungles of the Amazon or the Everglades of Florida.  All the signs point elsewhere.  The Western Hemisphere is indeed a new world.  The ancestors of the earliest Americans first began to reason and assert their superiority far from these shores.  The story of the earliest Americans begins in Europe and not so long ago a number of unimportant people found some very important things.

SPOILER:  The earliest North Americans were here 30,000 years ago.  This is an excellent examination of when and where the first inhabitants were located in North America.  Dr. Hibben has written an excellent explanation of the discovery of the first Americans.  It is an amazing book.  It is intriguing, like reading a mystery novel.