For Immediate Release Contact: Pat Kremer (312) 665-7100 (For Media Use Only) Take a 13,000-Year Journey Powered by Human Creativity The continents we now call the Americas, home to nearly 1 billion people, are a rich tapestry of cultures that interact, overlap, learn from one another and sometimes melt together, yet still retain their connections to the past, carry on unique traditions, and employ a variety of approaches to modern life. This grand diversity began long before Europeans arrived on Western shores. How did the mosaic of the Americas come to be? The Field Museum’s newest permanent exhibition, The Ancient Americas, takes you on that epic journey…beginning with the earliest humans to step foot on this land, many thousands of years ago. Ice Age Americans Step into the other-worldly landscape of Chicago at the end of the last Ice Age, and discover the sights and sounds that greeted the men and women who first populated our region. Enter an animated scene where snow falls on spruce trees, tall grasses bend in the chill wind, and Canada geese and osprey fly over lush wetlands. Hear their distinctive cries…and see a herd of woolly mammoths feeding quietly, unaware of the two-legged, wingless species that will soon shatter their tranquility. Countless mammoths like these – along with mastodons, bison, and other large beasts – would eventually fall prey to the stone spear points of the first human inhabitants of the Americas, whose ingenuity and skills mark them as distinctly modern humans. Archaeologists have found one particularly elegant design, the Clovis point, at sites from Washington to New York, and another type, the fishtail point, from Belize to the southern tip of South America. How did these early people manage, without modern forms of transportation and communication, to share their skills and knowledge across thousands of miles and many different environments? In The Ancient Americas, you can examine dozens of these spear points for yourself and find out what they can tell us about the people who made them. Learn what happened next in the “After the Ice Age Theater,” where environmental change sparks more human creativity. Continue>>