Patagonia - Colin McEwan

Some fourteen to ten thousand years ago, as ice-caps shrank and glaciers retreated, the first bands of hunter-gatherers began to colonise the continental extremity of South America. Their arrival marked the culmination of mankind's epic journey to people the globe.;These intrepid nomads confronted a hostile climate every bit as forbidding as Ice Age Europe as they settled the wilds of Fuego-Patagonia. Much later, sixteenth-century European voyagers encountered their descendants: the Aonikenk (southern Tehuelche), Selk'nam (Ona), Yamana (Yahgan) and Kawashekar (Alacaluf).;The first contacts led to tales of a race of giants and, ever since, Patagonia has exerted a special hold on the European imagination. Tragically, by the mid twentieth-century the last remnants of the indigenous way of life had disappeared for ever.;The essays in this volume trace a largely unwritten history of human adaptation, survival and eventual extinction. Published to accompany a major exhibition on Fuego-Patagonia at the Museum of Mankind, London.