Publisher's Synopsis
Walking the World 3, Book Three of Terrence Kero's groundbreaking trilogy about human migration, tells the story of how hunter-gatherer clans left Africa some 80,000 years ago, eventually migrated to Siberia, and walked across the Bering Land Bridge to North America during the last ice age, 12,000 to 24,000 years ago. Over the millennia, the Americas were populated by these ancient clans, the ancestors of today's indigenous tribes. The novel opens in 2015, when Hanna Koskinen, an anthropologist and expert in human migration, presents two papers at an international conference on the first migrations from Africa to Europe and to Asia. In attendance is James Wellington, chair of the Anthropology Department at Stanford University, who is impressed and offers Hanna a postdoctoral fellowship to research the first migrations to the Americas. It is a difficult decision for her, because she is teaching at a university in Thailand so that her son, Chaat, can be close to his Thai grandparents, but she finally accepts. During her initial research at Stanford, she finds DNA data identifying the hunter-gatherer clans that first migrated to the Americas, but there are conflicting theories about when those first migrations occurred. That is the riddle Hanna must solve. Interspersed with the narrative of her research and her budding romance with James Wellington are stories imagining the heroism and tragedies of those first people and their descendants, along with revelations about unexpected connections between Hanna's family and Indian tribes in Mississippi and Brazil.
