The American Autumn

THE WORLD BEFORE THE ICE

This is the final volume of the human story.

Not because the story ends here. Because this is where the four great expressions of the human blueprint (the Caucasian Winter, the African Spring, the Asian Summer, and now the American Autumn) finally converge into a single picture.

Before that convergence can be honest, this volume owes the reader something the first three books also lay out, so that everything that follows will make sense.

We humans have a base code which was formed over hundreds of thousands of years. It is this blueprint that separates us from the animal kingdom, allowing us to live with one another with a semblance of the productive peace that is a basic requirement for us all.

That code rests on three things, and they work together, not separately.

Rationality: the hard capacity to see that our own wishes, and our own tribes beliefs, may simply not be true, to accept what lies outside our control in life and in nature, to hold onto the plain fact that what goes around comes around, and to weigh todays choice against a child not yet born.

Recognition: seeing another person the way we see ourselves, thou art I, extended outward not only to strangers but to nature, and to the wider whole we are all a part of.

Respect: which is not a separate third thing so much as what naturally follows once Recognition has actually happened. Where all three hold together, the human blueprint holds. Where one goes first, the other two tend to follow it down.

That said, we humans are not fixed at birth. What happens to us shapes what we carry forward, the same conviction this series has held since Volume One.

The people who eventually populated the Americas endured a version of the same ordeal as the people in volume one in this series: The Caucasian Winter: generations of hard, cold isolation, closely resembling what happened to the people who would become the raiders this series has already traced across Europe and Asia.

But one thing was different. When the Steppe raiders finally broke free of their own confinement, they found other peoples lands to move into.

Yet, when the first Americans broke free of their prison of ice, they found two entire continents, with no one else to contend with, but themselves.

Whatever that long ordeal beat into them, then, had nowhere to go but inward, tested first against family, neighbor, and rival nation, long before it was ever tested against a stranger from across an ocean.

That is the story this volume tells: how a people shaped by their own version of the ice ages crucible built, broke, and rebuilt their codes among themselves for fifteen thousand years, before their distant counterparts, carrying the opposite legacy of that same shared trauma, finally arrived by ship.