About this item
Shortlisted for the 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Society Ralph Waldo Emerson Award A Kirkus Review Best Nonfiction Book of 2022. A deep-time history of animals and humans in North America, by the best-selling and award-winning author of Coyote America.In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America's known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent's evolutionary richness.Distinguished author Dan Flores's ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the "wild new world" of North America -- a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe.
About the Author
I'm a writer and former professor, born and raised in Louisiana but a resident of the American West - West Texas, Montana, now the Santa Fe area of Northern New Mexico - for more than 35 years. I spent most of my university career at the University of Montana in Missoula, where I was A. B. Hammond Professor of the History of the American West. A writing career that has so far produced ten books started with a major book on western exploration, followed by one on Indian traders in the Southwest. I went on to write several creative nonfiction and historical books about places in the American West, from the Llano Estacado and the Near Southwest to the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. Along the way I also wrote a book on the artists and photographers of the Northern Rocky Mountains, and teamed up with artist Amy Winton for a book of my photographs and her pastels of the canyons of West Texas. More recently, with my Amazon Bestseller, American Serengeti, and my New York Times Bestseller, Coyote America - both books published in 2016 - my focus has been nature writing and the "biographies" of animals like bison, wolves, wild horses, and especially the epic story of North America's fascinating and now most widespread small wolf, the coyote. My articles and essays on the environment, art, and culture of the West have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Texas Monthly, Orion, New Mexico Magazine, Wild West, Southwest Art, High Country News, and The Big Sky Journal, for which I wrote a column, "Images of the American West," for eight years. My books and articles have been honored by the PEN America Literary Awards, the Western Writers of America, the Western History Association, the Western Heritage Center, the Center for Great Plains Studies, the High Plains Book Awards, the Montana Book Awards, the Oklahoma Book Awards, the Denver Public Library, the Montana Historical Society, the Texas State Historical Association, and the University of Oklahoma Press.
