| NOTA |
(★)(In 1996, anthropologists were stunned by an extraordinary discovery near Kennewick, Washington. Skeletal remains found along the muddy banks of the Columbia River -and radio-carbon dated to between 9,300 and 9,600 years ago- were highly similar to those of the ancient Jomon people of northern Japan. Not only did this finding challenge conventional wisdom about hte first Americans, it also raised a seemingly unanswerable question : Could prehistoric mariners have reached North America by crossing thousands of miles of the tempestuous North Pacific in small open boats? A few years later, Jon Turk set out to prove they could have. In this remarkable narrative, adventurer and science writer Turk relates his two-year, 3,000-mile small-boat expedition to trace the probable route of the Jomon from northern Japan to the coast of Alaska by way of Siberia. Along the way, he introduces strong archaeological and anthropological evidence that he was not the first to follow this route. Paddling their tiny craft along the rugged Siberian coastline, Turk´s small party visits remote villages whose inhabitants wrest subsistence livings from stingy soil and frigid, treacherous waters. Turk´s descriptions of these hardy individualists -as tough and self-reliant as the Jomon voyagers must have been- offer a rare glimpse of the struggle to survive in one of our planet´s most unforgiving environments. Featuring sharply drawn encounters with the denizens of Siberia -both human and animal- and frightening near-disasters at sea, and graced by Turk´s deep insights into humankind´s relentless drive to explore new frontiers,´In the Wake of the Jomon´is the boldest and most thought-provoking sea adventure since´Kon-Tiki´. ◆Jon Turk, author of ´Cold Oceans : Adventures in Kayak, Rowboat, and Dogsled´, is a scientist, adventurer, and writer. He has paddled around Cape Horn, in the Northwest Passage, and in high-latitude oceans around the world. His two-year voyage around the North Pacific rim in the wake of Stone Age mariners has been named by Paddler magazine one of the ten greatest sea kayaking expeditions of all time.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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