Archaeology book tells prehistoric story

PALMER — Maybe she’s not an archeologist and maybe her theories regarding the population of the Americas are unpopular in American academia.

But Bonnye Matthews of Wasilla is a novelist, and she’s having a blast researching and writing a series of novels about prehistoric tribes coming to America before the popularly accepted theory of when they first arrived.

The first book, “Ki’ti’s Story, 75,000 B.C.,” is the subject of a book launch party she’s hosting at the Palmer Library Wednesday. It takes place in Asia, an area now known as China.

“It is a meeting of Neanderthals, Homo Erectus and Cro-Magnon all in the same place,” she said. “There’s no proof that that happened, but there’s certainly no proof that it didn’t happened.”

Later books will depict a group of pre-historic people journeying from Asia to Alaska.

“But the book is not the first migration, it is simply telling the story of where these people that you get to know in the first book get to an area where they travel to Mexico and back,” Matthews said.

In her book, she said, it was the sort of trip that was happening all the time, and well before what is traditionally taught in school as the Asia-America migration across the Bering Sea land bridge.

She said her research seems to bear out that people didn’t migrate here via the land bridge during the last ice age or down some ice-free corridor through Canada. Her research indicates there was no such corridor.

“If people came from Alaska to the Lower 48 they had to do it by boat because there wasn’t an ice-free corridor at that point,” she said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.

WHAT: Book launch

WHERE: Palmer Library

WHEN: 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., Aug. 29

There will be light refreshments, books for sale and a book signing.