Origin

Rather than spoon feed you a definitive account of the ever-evolving science on ancient human migration to the Americas, Jennifer Raff presents and evaluates the archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and indigenous evidence against the numerous theories that have been proposed. At the same time, Raff deeply engages with the problematic nature of many attempts to investigate the history of the first peoples of the Americas both at the start and throughout this book. Overall, this book gives you a much better understanding of the state of play in the field and a framework for evaluating the ongoing work in the space. Highly recommend.

4.5 stars. While "Origin" is an excellent book, it felt a bit dry. For example, the chapter describing how a geneticist performs a genetic analysis from ancient DNA was both extremely interesting (I learned a lot) and painfully boring (it is such a boring task!). Regardless of that issue, it is quite interesting to learn about the different theories (even the discarded ones!). What I was surprised is that there is little to no mention of the influence of South Pacific people, which I thought had an early influence in the continental peopling.