This book is the tale of two deep springs in Florida that began as sinkholes about 13,000 years ago and the story of the precious water they contained. Alternating chapters present events occurring at one of two time-periods, recent and prehistoric. The prehistoric narratives explore the lives of the earliest people to arrive in Florida, roaming hunter-gatherers who discovered the springs about 10,000 years ago and revisited them for thousands of years. The mineral charged spring water sustained Florida's earliest human populations in dry times and preserved their bones and artifacts for thousands of years. THese tales are fiction but based on the knowledge we gained in studies of Florida's first people. The second time-period is recent and factual. Often outrageously stranger than fiction, it follows recent events int he history of the springs - the remarkable people who dived in the deep water-filled holes and put together the picture of human life-ways 10,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene Era. DNA analysis by world renown Svante Paabo revealed that these first Floridians were unrelated to the Native Americans living in North America today
