Publisher's Synopsis
Archaelogical evidence suggests that, between ten and fifteen thousand years ago, Stone Age mariners paddled cedar log canoes from Japan to North America, crossing Arctic seas and skirting the edge of a receding ice cap. How did they do it, and why? In 1999 and 2000, Jon Turk and his expedition partners repeated this passage in 16-foot open-cockpit kayaks and trimarans, enduring the deepwater whirlpools in the Kuril Islands, the close-out surf of the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the capricious storms of the Bering Sea. As the months and seasons unfolded, all but one of his partners abandoned the expedition, and he paddled northward with a Russian friend alone. Pushed to the limits of endurance by autumn gales, they finally reached North American territory - St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait. It was an epic adventure, but In the Wake of the Jomon is much more than an adventure narrative - it is also a fascinating inquiry into the history and migrations of a Stone Age people, the Jomon, one of whose bones were found in Washington State, on the banks of the Columbia River, in 1996.;Radiocarbon dating revealed that the man with Caucasoid features - long, narrow braincase, narrow face, slightly projecting upper jaw - died 9,300 to 9,600 years ago. Accumulating evidence points to a Jomon migration from Japan to North America 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, contravening the established paradigm that the first Americans were solely terrestrial mammoth hunters who walked across the Bering Land Bridge. Trained as a scientist, Jon Turk has kayaked ice-bound and stormy coastlines for decades while making a living by writing environmental and earth science textbooks. Some of his adventures are recounted in Cold Oceans: Adventures in Kayak, Rowboat, and Dogsled (HarperCollins, 1998). Turk became fascinated by the Jomon migration and, after absorbing all the climatological and anthropological information and evidence for this great migration, set about to recreate it much as Thor Heyerdahl, 50 years ago, voyaged across the Pacific on the raft Kon-Tiki in support of his theory for the colonization of the South Pacific islands.;Turk investigates not just the how's of the Jomon migration, but also the why's: why would they leave their lush temperate forested coastline for a forbidding, desolate tundra at the edge of a receding glacier? Archaelogical evidence can't answer this, but Turk's speculations, while he camps on the same shores and battles the same elements, provide some of the more memorable passages of the book. Thus, In the Wake of the Jomon escapes the adventure niche market - with its central dilemma of convincing an impersonal audience to care about a highly personal adventure - by wrapping a serious argument inside a gripping narrative about the sea, an ancient people, and the wilderness of northeast Siberia. This book offers the best of two worlds: strong appeal to the adventure market, and unusual cross-over potential in the general nonfiction market.
