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Fossil Legends of the First Americans

Amazon.com Price:  $29.06 (as of 23/04/2019 05:51 PST- Details)

Description

The burnt-red badlands of Montana’s Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. The ones hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the primary people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the weather. What did Native Americans make of these stone skeletons, and how did they provide an explanation for the teeth and claws of gargantuan animals no person had seen alive? Did they speculate about their deaths? Did they collect fossils?

Beginning within the East, with its Ice Age monsters, and ending within the West, where dinosaurs lived and died, this richly illustrated and elegantly written book examines the discoveries of enormous bones and uses of fossils for medicine, hunting magic, and spells. Well before Columbus, Native Americans observed the mysterious petrified remains of extinct creatures and sought to be aware their transformation to stone. In perceptive creation stories, they visualized the remains of extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine creatures as Monster Bears, Giant Lizards, Thunder Birds, and Water Monsters. Their insights, some so sophisticated that they anticipate brand new scientific theories, were passed down in oral histories over many centuries.

Drawing on historical sources, archaeology, traditional accounts, and extensive personal interviews, Adrienne Mayor takes us from Aztec and Inca fossil tales to the traditions of the Iroquois, Navajos, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees. Fossil Legends of the First Americans represents a huge step forward in our working out of how humans made sense of fossils before evolutionary theory developed.

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