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After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC
20,000 B.C., the peak of the last ice age--the atmosphere is heavy with dust, deserts, and glaciers span vast regions, and people, if they survive at all, exist in small, mobile groups, facing the threat of extinction.
But these people live on the brink of seismic change--10,000 years of climate shifts culminating in abrupt global warming that will usher in a fundamentally changed human world. After the Ice is the story of this momentous period--one in which a seemingly minor alteration in temperature could presage anything from the spread of lush woodland to the coming of apocalyptic floods--and one in which we find the origins of civilization itself.
Drawing on the latest research in archaeology, human genetics, and environmental science, After the Ice takes the reader on a sweeping tour of 15,000 years of human history. Steven Mithen brings this world to life through the eyes of an imaginary modern traveler--John Lubbock, namesake of the great Victorian polymath and author of Prehistoric Times. With Lubbock, readers visit and observe communities and landscapes, experiencing prehistoric life--from aboriginal hunting parties in Tasmania, to the corralling of wild sheep in the central Sahara, to the efforts of the Guila Naquitz people in Oaxaca to combat drought with agricultural innovations.
Part history, part science, part time travel, After the Ice offers an evocative and uniquely compelling portrayal of diverse cultures, lives, and landscapes that laid the foundations of the modern world.
But these people live on the brink of seismic change--10,000 years of climate shifts culminating in abrupt global warming that will usher in a fundamentally changed human world. After the Ice is the story of this momentous period--one in which a seemingly minor alteration in temperature could presage anything from the spread of lush woodland to the coming of apocalyptic floods--and one in which we find the origins of civilization itself.
Drawing on the latest research in archaeology, human genetics, and environmental science, After the Ice takes the reader on a sweeping tour of 15,000 years of human history. Steven Mithen brings this world to life through the eyes of an imaginary modern traveler--John Lubbock, namesake of the great Victorian polymath and author of Prehistoric Times. With Lubbock, readers visit and observe communities and landscapes, experiencing prehistoric life--from aboriginal hunting parties in Tasmania, to the corralling of wild sheep in the central Sahara, to the efforts of the Guila Naquitz people in Oaxaca to combat drought with agricultural innovations.
Part history, part science, part time travel, After the Ice offers an evocative and uniquely compelling portrayal of diverse cultures, lives, and landscapes that laid the foundations of the modern world.
664 pages, Paperback
First published June 26, 2003
301 people are currently reading
6724 people want to read
About the author
Steven Mithen
20 books87 followersSteven Mithen is Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading, having previously served as Pro Vice Chancellor and Deputy Vice Chancellor. He received a BA in prehistory and archaeology from Sheffield University, a MSc degree in biological computation from York University and a PhD in archaeology from Cambridge University.
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December 29, 2015
Years ago, as an undergraduate at BYU, I was a teaching assistant to Dr. Dale Berge for a semester. Much of my time was spent boiling down textbooks into study notes for students, like an alchemist trying to extract gold from lead. It was a lot like real work. For the life of me, I can't recall the names of the textbooks (that may be a subconsious effort to forget the difficulty of the work), but they were broad world surveys of archaeology that were state-of-the-art at the time (the mid-'90s). I pored over thousands of pages, taking notes and distilling the information down into outline form for an upcoming survey class that Dr. Berge was teaching. To say I learned a lot is an understatement - I was only an anthropology minor, so I didn't have the breadth of knowledge that some of the other T.A.s had. But I knew more than the students in the classes for whom I was preparing the study outlines, so there was that, I suppose.
Previous to that time, I had read Alexander Marshack's outstanding The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginning of Man's First Art, Symbol and Notation, which covers a time frame that mostly preceded those covered in Mithen's After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC, though there may be some overlap. Come to think of it, my reading of Marshack's book probably led me to want to minor in Anthropology. That book had a powerful effect on me, thrusting me back into prehistory, while fostering in me an appreciation for the human subjects of all this cool, brain-tickling research.
During the winter break following my T.A. stint with Dr. Berge, I read Marija Gimbutas' Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization, which covers a time period primarily after that covered by Mithen.
So when I first heard of this book, I thought it might be a good survey for filling in those "gap years" between the years covered by Marshack and Gimbutas.
Thankfully, I was right. This is an excellent survey, with a couple of weaknesses. Let me tell you why.
First of all, scope. Mithen does an outstanding job of covering the large-scale geological and atmospheric changes that took place over this rather dynamic, often turbulent, time in the Earth's history. After a long ice age, the weather warmed for a time, then dipped back into a short, but intense, ice age, then gradually warmed up again, this time with further reaching, more long-lasting effects that we see even to this day.
But Mithen isn't content with just painting a large-scale canvas. In order to bring us back down to human scale, he employs two characters with the same name: John Lubbock. The first John Lubbock was a Victorian archaeologist who brought some needed scientific rigor to the archaeological field. The second John Lubbock is a fictional character from our era who travels back in time to observe conditions and, more importantly, to observe the everyday doings of everyday people in the many different societies he visits. Their views are often contrasted to show the advances that archaeologists have made since the early days of archaeology as a science. Often, he does so step by step, showing the progression that has been made over time with new discoveries.
Along the way, as Mithen goes from era to era (from 20,000 to 5000 BC) and continent to continent (covering everything except Antarctica, much to my relief), he shows the "how" of archaeology and much of why certain methods were used, how some earlier (Victorian) assumptions cast a false light on the past, and who were the key figures in gaining said insights.
Sometimes, the simple jettisoning of preconceived notions of what one thinks they ought to find gives a clearer picture of what actually happened. This is the case with the discoveries at Oleneostrovski Mogilnik (Deer Island), where initial data, collected by Soviet archaeologists, was interpreted through the filter of (incorrect) Marxist ideas of prehistoric social structure. Later, when the same data was reinterpreted, a completely different picture of the ancient activities at that site emerged. At other times, the old notion of "the simplest explanation must be the best explanation" had to be abandoned, as happened at Creswell Crags, where earlier archaeologists had taken it for granted that remains found at the same stratum must have been collected there at the same time. Erosion hadn't figured into their equation. As later digs revealed, a single layer of sediment does not necessarily contain items of a single provenance.
Mithen excels at exposing the reader to a number of different archaeological methodologies. In 45 pages, he covers the basic science behind, and provides examples of the use of archeo-zoology, historical genetics, and historical linguistics in reconstructing the past. His presentation of these and many other methods of delving into prehistory are thorough, catching the subtleties of each, without dragging the reader down with too much detail.
The big picture never escapes Mithen, and he does well to present several sides of some controversial issues. For instance, on the question of the disappearance of megafauna such as the mastadon from North America, and whether the cause of their extinction was disease or over-hunting, his answer is . . . neither . . . and both. Mithen argues that the climactic change that occured with the warming of the Earth after the last ice age forced such animals into tight niches that could not sustain them, making them easy prey for hunters and particularly susceptible to disease. He cites several different pieces of evidence for this, not least of which is the very limited use of such animals in ancient North Americans' diets, as evidenced by the multitude of rabbit and fowl bones that show cut marks from butchering, versus the very small number of such bones coming from megafauna. Yes, there is evidence that the use of the clovis point might have been necessary to take down bigger game (though some think that the clovis point was all for show and trade, and not for use as a real weapon) and there is evidence for disease and famine (signs of starvation in megafaunal bones), but his argument, that the changes in habitat precipitated megafaunal populations, allowing them to be in a position to be pushed "over the edge," seems convincing.
So this is the best book on prehistory ever, right? Not so fast. We wouldn't be following Mithen's lead if we just bought this hook, line, and sinker, now would we? After all, Mithen makes it obvious that his "newer" John Lubbock sections are fictional, though they derive from suppositions arising out of the archaeological record. But what if the suppositions are wrong, or at least suspicious?
As an example, Mithen gives a fictional account of John Lubbock's visit to Mesopotamia, particularly the site at Zawi Chemi Shanidar, some time between 11,000 and 9000 BC. Here Lubbock witnesses the ritualized killing of baby goats by people dressed up in costumes that were partially constructed from vulture and eagle wings. It's great fiction: the costumed participants circle a campfire where the goats have been gathered to the rhythmic beating of a skin drum. The goats shiver with fear, then, at the climax of the ritual, the "vultures and eagles" swoop down and wring the goat's next, falling all about, spent from the orgiastic energy of the ritual.
Except it didn't happen. "Maybe it did," you say. I say "prove it".
Mithen's "proof" is that several vulture and eagle wings were buried along with several young goat skulls near a fire. But who's to say that the birds of prey weren't eaten and the dinner guests just didn't like wings? Perhaps the wings were removed for other reasons, as trophies, like a deer head in a man-cave today. And what of the goats? They found skulls, but no clear evidence that they were strangled. That's pure supposition. It's fiction. It makes a great story. But it's just that: a story that Mithen made up. Even he admits, several times throughout the book, that when archaeologists can't find a good reason for some of the strangeness they uncover, the default argument is that the weird assemblages are a result of ritual. It's easy to cite modern instances where religious ritual might have been assumed from the leftover trash and detritus of some very non-religious, non-ritualistic activities. Sometimes, these sorts of things are even faked. Such a thing happened not two miles from where I live.
But let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Mithen's After the Ice is as good as it gets, so far as archaeological writing is concerned. If you need evidence of that, just look up a few of the books he references - b-o-r-i-n-g. And his science, for the most part, is sound. And if you, like me, had not read a survey of archaeological discoveries for over twenty years, I invite you to delve into Mithen's book. Because the further we move into the future, the more we know about the past.
Previous to that time, I had read Alexander Marshack's outstanding The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginning of Man's First Art, Symbol and Notation, which covers a time frame that mostly preceded those covered in Mithen's After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC, though there may be some overlap. Come to think of it, my reading of Marshack's book probably led me to want to minor in Anthropology. That book had a powerful effect on me, thrusting me back into prehistory, while fostering in me an appreciation for the human subjects of all this cool, brain-tickling research.
During the winter break following my T.A. stint with Dr. Berge, I read Marija Gimbutas' Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization, which covers a time period primarily after that covered by Mithen.
So when I first heard of this book, I thought it might be a good survey for filling in those "gap years" between the years covered by Marshack and Gimbutas.
Thankfully, I was right. This is an excellent survey, with a couple of weaknesses. Let me tell you why.
First of all, scope. Mithen does an outstanding job of covering the large-scale geological and atmospheric changes that took place over this rather dynamic, often turbulent, time in the Earth's history. After a long ice age, the weather warmed for a time, then dipped back into a short, but intense, ice age, then gradually warmed up again, this time with further reaching, more long-lasting effects that we see even to this day.
But Mithen isn't content with just painting a large-scale canvas. In order to bring us back down to human scale, he employs two characters with the same name: John Lubbock. The first John Lubbock was a Victorian archaeologist who brought some needed scientific rigor to the archaeological field. The second John Lubbock is a fictional character from our era who travels back in time to observe conditions and, more importantly, to observe the everyday doings of everyday people in the many different societies he visits. Their views are often contrasted to show the advances that archaeologists have made since the early days of archaeology as a science. Often, he does so step by step, showing the progression that has been made over time with new discoveries.
Along the way, as Mithen goes from era to era (from 20,000 to 5000 BC) and continent to continent (covering everything except Antarctica, much to my relief), he shows the "how" of archaeology and much of why certain methods were used, how some earlier (Victorian) assumptions cast a false light on the past, and who were the key figures in gaining said insights.
Sometimes, the simple jettisoning of preconceived notions of what one thinks they ought to find gives a clearer picture of what actually happened. This is the case with the discoveries at Oleneostrovski Mogilnik (Deer Island), where initial data, collected by Soviet archaeologists, was interpreted through the filter of (incorrect) Marxist ideas of prehistoric social structure. Later, when the same data was reinterpreted, a completely different picture of the ancient activities at that site emerged. At other times, the old notion of "the simplest explanation must be the best explanation" had to be abandoned, as happened at Creswell Crags, where earlier archaeologists had taken it for granted that remains found at the same stratum must have been collected there at the same time. Erosion hadn't figured into their equation. As later digs revealed, a single layer of sediment does not necessarily contain items of a single provenance.
Mithen excels at exposing the reader to a number of different archaeological methodologies. In 45 pages, he covers the basic science behind, and provides examples of the use of archeo-zoology, historical genetics, and historical linguistics in reconstructing the past. His presentation of these and many other methods of delving into prehistory are thorough, catching the subtleties of each, without dragging the reader down with too much detail.
The big picture never escapes Mithen, and he does well to present several sides of some controversial issues. For instance, on the question of the disappearance of megafauna such as the mastadon from North America, and whether the cause of their extinction was disease or over-hunting, his answer is . . . neither . . . and both. Mithen argues that the climactic change that occured with the warming of the Earth after the last ice age forced such animals into tight niches that could not sustain them, making them easy prey for hunters and particularly susceptible to disease. He cites several different pieces of evidence for this, not least of which is the very limited use of such animals in ancient North Americans' diets, as evidenced by the multitude of rabbit and fowl bones that show cut marks from butchering, versus the very small number of such bones coming from megafauna. Yes, there is evidence that the use of the clovis point might have been necessary to take down bigger game (though some think that the clovis point was all for show and trade, and not for use as a real weapon) and there is evidence for disease and famine (signs of starvation in megafaunal bones), but his argument, that the changes in habitat precipitated megafaunal populations, allowing them to be in a position to be pushed "over the edge," seems convincing.
So this is the best book on prehistory ever, right? Not so fast. We wouldn't be following Mithen's lead if we just bought this hook, line, and sinker, now would we? After all, Mithen makes it obvious that his "newer" John Lubbock sections are fictional, though they derive from suppositions arising out of the archaeological record. But what if the suppositions are wrong, or at least suspicious?
As an example, Mithen gives a fictional account of John Lubbock's visit to Mesopotamia, particularly the site at Zawi Chemi Shanidar, some time between 11,000 and 9000 BC. Here Lubbock witnesses the ritualized killing of baby goats by people dressed up in costumes that were partially constructed from vulture and eagle wings. It's great fiction: the costumed participants circle a campfire where the goats have been gathered to the rhythmic beating of a skin drum. The goats shiver with fear, then, at the climax of the ritual, the "vultures and eagles" swoop down and wring the goat's next, falling all about, spent from the orgiastic energy of the ritual.
Except it didn't happen. "Maybe it did," you say. I say "prove it".
Mithen's "proof" is that several vulture and eagle wings were buried along with several young goat skulls near a fire. But who's to say that the birds of prey weren't eaten and the dinner guests just didn't like wings? Perhaps the wings were removed for other reasons, as trophies, like a deer head in a man-cave today. And what of the goats? They found skulls, but no clear evidence that they were strangled. That's pure supposition. It's fiction. It makes a great story. But it's just that: a story that Mithen made up. Even he admits, several times throughout the book, that when archaeologists can't find a good reason for some of the strangeness they uncover, the default argument is that the weird assemblages are a result of ritual. It's easy to cite modern instances where religious ritual might have been assumed from the leftover trash and detritus of some very non-religious, non-ritualistic activities. Sometimes, these sorts of things are even faked. Such a thing happened not two miles from where I live.
But let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Mithen's After the Ice is as good as it gets, so far as archaeological writing is concerned. If you need evidence of that, just look up a few of the books he references - b-o-r-i-n-g. And his science, for the most part, is sound. And if you, like me, had not read a survey of archaeological discoveries for over twenty years, I invite you to delve into Mithen's book. Because the further we move into the future, the more we know about the past.
Read
October 21, 2024It is always admirable when scientists step out of their ivory tower and attempt to reach a wider audience. This is somewhat derogatory called 'vulgarization'. Unfortunately, not all attempts are successful, and this book is one of them. This is certainly not due to a lack of expertise, because Steven Mithen, professor of archeology at the University of Reading (UK), knows his field of studies through and through. In that regard, this book contains a state-of-the-art overview of human history between 20,000 and 5,000 BC. However, he has spread that overview over more than 50 chapters, each time focusing on a concrete archaeological site, somewhere in the world. This produces a very disparate picture, and that is logical, because the situation around 9,000 BC between, for example, Southwest Asia and the Amazon region was quite different. In other words, by zooming in on specific places, this book suffers from a lack of synthesis, which should be a core feature of any good vulgarization.
In addition, Mithen tackles his subject-matter from very different perspectives. In each chapter, he provides factual information about the archaeological site(s), and about the knowledge gained from the archaeological research. With a few exceptions, that information is absolutely correct and complete, albeit according to the insights at the time of the publication of this book in 2003. Of course, these data have a somewhat dry-scientific form, and apparently Mithen thought it necessary to literally ‘bring them to life’. Therefore, he stages a time traveler named John Lubbock, and makes him travel back to the moments when human communities actually lived in those places. And so he sketches, for example, how Lubbock visits Jericho on the West Bank (now Palestinian territory), anno 9,600 BC one of the first cities in the world, and one of the earliest agricultural areas. Through Lubbock we get a picture of what life in that densely packed city would have been like. Ditto for many other areas, on the Yangtse River in China for example, or with aboriginal communities in Australia, and so on. As one can guess, Mithen does allow himself quite a bit of poetic freedom here, in the sense that he fills in many aspects of the life at the time (the division of roles between men and women, for example) on the basis of his own interpretations and imagination. In the extensive footnotes, he tries to justify this creative input scientifically, but it must be said that on many occasions I had to frown and wasn't convinced by his clarifications.
In addition, Mithen not only sketches the exploits of his time traveler John Lubbock. He also adds travel reports of his own visits to the archaeological sites discussed, and views by other archeologists on the same finds. And to add to the confusion, he also regularly quotes from the handbook published by a prominent Victorian archaeologist in the 19th century, a man who also went by the name of John Lubbock. As a result, one gets a very dizzying feel whilst reading this book, jumping between John Lubbock the time traveller, John Lubbock the Victorian, Steven Mithen travelling the world and the views of lots of other fellows-archeologists. One would lose the north for less. I really don't understand how a publisher couldn't talk Mithen out of this approach. Because by making such a mess, he unfortunately misses his vulgarizing goal. A pity for the enormous energy he has put in this book. Rating 2.5 stars.
In addition, Mithen tackles his subject-matter from very different perspectives. In each chapter, he provides factual information about the archaeological site(s), and about the knowledge gained from the archaeological research. With a few exceptions, that information is absolutely correct and complete, albeit according to the insights at the time of the publication of this book in 2003. Of course, these data have a somewhat dry-scientific form, and apparently Mithen thought it necessary to literally ‘bring them to life’. Therefore, he stages a time traveler named John Lubbock, and makes him travel back to the moments when human communities actually lived in those places. And so he sketches, for example, how Lubbock visits Jericho on the West Bank (now Palestinian territory), anno 9,600 BC one of the first cities in the world, and one of the earliest agricultural areas. Through Lubbock we get a picture of what life in that densely packed city would have been like. Ditto for many other areas, on the Yangtse River in China for example, or with aboriginal communities in Australia, and so on. As one can guess, Mithen does allow himself quite a bit of poetic freedom here, in the sense that he fills in many aspects of the life at the time (the division of roles between men and women, for example) on the basis of his own interpretations and imagination. In the extensive footnotes, he tries to justify this creative input scientifically, but it must be said that on many occasions I had to frown and wasn't convinced by his clarifications.
In addition, Mithen not only sketches the exploits of his time traveler John Lubbock. He also adds travel reports of his own visits to the archaeological sites discussed, and views by other archeologists on the same finds. And to add to the confusion, he also regularly quotes from the handbook published by a prominent Victorian archaeologist in the 19th century, a man who also went by the name of John Lubbock. As a result, one gets a very dizzying feel whilst reading this book, jumping between John Lubbock the time traveller, John Lubbock the Victorian, Steven Mithen travelling the world and the views of lots of other fellows-archeologists. One would lose the north for less. I really don't understand how a publisher couldn't talk Mithen out of this approach. Because by making such a mess, he unfortunately misses his vulgarizing goal. A pity for the enormous energy he has put in this book. Rating 2.5 stars.
July 1, 2021
Steven Mithen has really gone out of his way to give a global view of a very early period in human history. He zooms in on more than 50 places, literally spread all over the world, places where remarkable archaeological finds have been done that give us more insight into the impressive evolution that mankind went through between 20,000 and 5,000 BC. Roughly speaking, this comes down to the transition from a life as a hunter-gatherer to a farmer and even town dweller.
Mithen has put an enormous amount of information into this book, and also provides the latest state of the art of archaeological research, at least at the time of publication in 2003. He also outlines cleverly what is still hotly debated, such as for example on whether agriculture has spread through migration, or through acculturation. Mithen has even managed to include the first results of the historical-genetic research of modern humans, but of course his book came too early for the groundbreaking new knowledge that paleogenetics (the genetic research on fossil remains) now yields. In that sense, this book is slightly outdated.
But… there are very big downsides to this book. Mithen has tried to reach a large audience with this book, and he does so by sending a time traveler to visit the more than 50 archaeological sites in their original time. This is done so clumsily that the author completely misses target. Unfortunately, because of these and several other missteps I really cannot recommend this book, despite Mithen's best efforts. See also the review in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Mithen has put an enormous amount of information into this book, and also provides the latest state of the art of archaeological research, at least at the time of publication in 2003. He also outlines cleverly what is still hotly debated, such as for example on whether agriculture has spread through migration, or through acculturation. Mithen has even managed to include the first results of the historical-genetic research of modern humans, but of course his book came too early for the groundbreaking new knowledge that paleogenetics (the genetic research on fossil remains) now yields. In that sense, this book is slightly outdated.
But… there are very big downsides to this book. Mithen has tried to reach a large audience with this book, and he does so by sending a time traveler to visit the more than 50 archaeological sites in their original time. This is done so clumsily that the author completely misses target. Unfortunately, because of these and several other missteps I really cannot recommend this book, despite Mithen's best efforts. See also the review in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
September 23, 2016
The LRB review can be read here: http://www.karimsadr.com/resources/Mi...
I did ramble at length initially in this review-space but deleted it all as entirely irrelevant. Simply put this book is just about as good a piece of work as one could expect from such a thing, and I unhesitatingly recommend it to all and sundry. Absolutely fascinating from start to finish, with a willingness to explore controversy and be clear when he moves on to guess-work.
Some quotes:
From the intro:
“I make use of John Lubbock to ensure that this history is about people's lives rather than just the objects that archaeologists find. My own eyes cannot escape the present. I am unable to see beyond the discarded stone tools and food debris, the ruins of empty houses and the fireplaces that are cold to the touch. Although excavations provide doors to other cultures, such doors can only be forced ajar and never passed through. I can, however, use my imagination to squeeze John Lubbock through the gaps so that he can see what is denied to my own eyes, and become what the travel writer Paul Theroux has described as a 'stranger in a strange land'. Theroux was writing about his own desire to experience 'otherness to its limit'; how becoming a stranger allowed him to discover who he was and what he stood for.
This is what archaeology can do for all of us today. As globalisation leads to a bland cultural homogeneity throughout the world, imaginative travel to prehistoric times is perhaps the only way we can now acquire that extreme sense of otherness by which we recognise ourselves. And it is the only means that I have found to translate the archaeological evidence I know into the type of human history I wish to write.
From later:
"Archaeologists are still struggling to understand the new lifestyle that the Late Natufian people of the Jordan and Euphrates valleys adopted during the Younger Dryas. A telling source of evidence is their burial practice, and how this had changed from those of their village-based ancestors. Perhaps the most striking development is that people were no longer interred wearing elaborate head-dresses, necklaces, bracelets and pendants made from animal bones and seashells. The fact that about a quarter of the Early Natufians had been buried in this fashion suggested that some had been much more wealthy and powerful than others. Wealth and power had evidently been dependent on sedentary village life. This provided an elite with the opportunity to control the trade that brought seashells and other items to the villages. A return to mobile lifestyles swept away their power base and society became egalitarian once again, much as it had been in the Kebaran period. The absence of seashells adorning the dead was not because such shells were no longer available - they are found in abundance in Late Natufian settlements. Rather than being placed with the dead they were simply discarded with the domestic rubbish, along with bone beads and pendants. The shells had lost their value because there was no longer any control over their distribution - mobile hunter-gatherers were able to collect seashells for themselves and trade with whom they wished."
And
“Why create the social tensions that inevitably arise when one has permanent next-door neighbours within a village? Why expose oneself to human waste and garbage and the health risks that accompany a more sedentary lifestyle? Why risk the depletion of the animals and plants near one's own village? We can be almost certain that people were not forced into this lifestyle by over-population. Natufian sites are no more abundant than those of the previous times; if there had been a time of population pressure it was at 14,500 BC when there is a dramatic increase in the number of Kebaran sites and the standardisation of microlith forms. There is no evidence for a population increase two millennia later when the first Natufian villages appear. Moreover, from the evidence of their bones, the Natufian people were reasonably healthy quite unlike a people being forced into an undesirable lifestyle by shortage of food.
Anna Belfer-Cohen of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has studied the skeletal evidence and found very few signs of trauma, such as healed fractures, nutritional deficiencies or infectious diseases. People under stress tend to develop thin lines in their tooth enamel- called hypoplasias. These indicate periods of food shortage, often immediately after weaning. The lines are less frequent in Natufian teeth than in those of farming people. But both Natufian teeth and those of early farmers are heavily worn down. This confirms the importance of plants in their diet: when seeds and nuts were ground down in the stone mortars, grit would have become incorporated in the resulting flour or paste. And when the food was eaten, this grit abraded the teeth, often leaving them with hardly any enamel at all. The Natufian people appear to have been quite peaceable as well as healthy. There are no signs of conflict between groups, such as embedded arrow points in human bones unlike the situation that Lubbock will find on his European, Australian and African travels. The Natufian hunter-gatherer groups were good neighbours; there was plenty of land, gardens and animals for all. It is possible that the Natufian and Abu Hureyran people were prepared to suffer the downside of village life - the social tensions, the human waste, depletion of resources - to enjoy the benefits. Francois Valla, the excavator of 'Ain Mallaha, believes that the Natufian villages simply emerged from the seasonal gatherings of the Kebaran people.
He recalls the work of the social anthropologist Marcel Mauss who lived with hunter-gatherers in the Arctic at the turn of the century. Mauss recognised that periodic gatherings were characterised by intense communal life, by feasts and religious ceremonies, by intellectual discussion, and by lots of sex. In comparison, the rest of the year, when people lived in small far-flung groups, was rather dull. Valla suggests that the aggregation of mobile hunters and gatherers prior to the Natufian may have been similar, and the Natufian people simply had the opportunity to stretch out those periods of aggregation, until they effectively continued for the whole year. Indeed, all the key elements of the Natufian villages were already present at Neve David: stone dwellings, grinding stones, dentalium beads, human burials and gazelle bones. As the climate became warmer and wetter, plants and animals more diverse and abundant, people stayed longer and returned earlier to their winter aggregation sites until some people remained all year round."
I did ramble at length initially in this review-space but deleted it all as entirely irrelevant. Simply put this book is just about as good a piece of work as one could expect from such a thing, and I unhesitatingly recommend it to all and sundry. Absolutely fascinating from start to finish, with a willingness to explore controversy and be clear when he moves on to guess-work.
Some quotes:
From the intro:
“I make use of John Lubbock to ensure that this history is about people's lives rather than just the objects that archaeologists find. My own eyes cannot escape the present. I am unable to see beyond the discarded stone tools and food debris, the ruins of empty houses and the fireplaces that are cold to the touch. Although excavations provide doors to other cultures, such doors can only be forced ajar and never passed through. I can, however, use my imagination to squeeze John Lubbock through the gaps so that he can see what is denied to my own eyes, and become what the travel writer Paul Theroux has described as a 'stranger in a strange land'. Theroux was writing about his own desire to experience 'otherness to its limit'; how becoming a stranger allowed him to discover who he was and what he stood for.
This is what archaeology can do for all of us today. As globalisation leads to a bland cultural homogeneity throughout the world, imaginative travel to prehistoric times is perhaps the only way we can now acquire that extreme sense of otherness by which we recognise ourselves. And it is the only means that I have found to translate the archaeological evidence I know into the type of human history I wish to write.
From later:
"Archaeologists are still struggling to understand the new lifestyle that the Late Natufian people of the Jordan and Euphrates valleys adopted during the Younger Dryas. A telling source of evidence is their burial practice, and how this had changed from those of their village-based ancestors. Perhaps the most striking development is that people were no longer interred wearing elaborate head-dresses, necklaces, bracelets and pendants made from animal bones and seashells. The fact that about a quarter of the Early Natufians had been buried in this fashion suggested that some had been much more wealthy and powerful than others. Wealth and power had evidently been dependent on sedentary village life. This provided an elite with the opportunity to control the trade that brought seashells and other items to the villages. A return to mobile lifestyles swept away their power base and society became egalitarian once again, much as it had been in the Kebaran period. The absence of seashells adorning the dead was not because such shells were no longer available - they are found in abundance in Late Natufian settlements. Rather than being placed with the dead they were simply discarded with the domestic rubbish, along with bone beads and pendants. The shells had lost their value because there was no longer any control over their distribution - mobile hunter-gatherers were able to collect seashells for themselves and trade with whom they wished."
And
“Why create the social tensions that inevitably arise when one has permanent next-door neighbours within a village? Why expose oneself to human waste and garbage and the health risks that accompany a more sedentary lifestyle? Why risk the depletion of the animals and plants near one's own village? We can be almost certain that people were not forced into this lifestyle by over-population. Natufian sites are no more abundant than those of the previous times; if there had been a time of population pressure it was at 14,500 BC when there is a dramatic increase in the number of Kebaran sites and the standardisation of microlith forms. There is no evidence for a population increase two millennia later when the first Natufian villages appear. Moreover, from the evidence of their bones, the Natufian people were reasonably healthy quite unlike a people being forced into an undesirable lifestyle by shortage of food.
Anna Belfer-Cohen of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has studied the skeletal evidence and found very few signs of trauma, such as healed fractures, nutritional deficiencies or infectious diseases. People under stress tend to develop thin lines in their tooth enamel- called hypoplasias. These indicate periods of food shortage, often immediately after weaning. The lines are less frequent in Natufian teeth than in those of farming people. But both Natufian teeth and those of early farmers are heavily worn down. This confirms the importance of plants in their diet: when seeds and nuts were ground down in the stone mortars, grit would have become incorporated in the resulting flour or paste. And when the food was eaten, this grit abraded the teeth, often leaving them with hardly any enamel at all. The Natufian people appear to have been quite peaceable as well as healthy. There are no signs of conflict between groups, such as embedded arrow points in human bones unlike the situation that Lubbock will find on his European, Australian and African travels. The Natufian hunter-gatherer groups were good neighbours; there was plenty of land, gardens and animals for all. It is possible that the Natufian and Abu Hureyran people were prepared to suffer the downside of village life - the social tensions, the human waste, depletion of resources - to enjoy the benefits. Francois Valla, the excavator of 'Ain Mallaha, believes that the Natufian villages simply emerged from the seasonal gatherings of the Kebaran people.
He recalls the work of the social anthropologist Marcel Mauss who lived with hunter-gatherers in the Arctic at the turn of the century. Mauss recognised that periodic gatherings were characterised by intense communal life, by feasts and religious ceremonies, by intellectual discussion, and by lots of sex. In comparison, the rest of the year, when people lived in small far-flung groups, was rather dull. Valla suggests that the aggregation of mobile hunters and gatherers prior to the Natufian may have been similar, and the Natufian people simply had the opportunity to stretch out those periods of aggregation, until they effectively continued for the whole year. Indeed, all the key elements of the Natufian villages were already present at Neve David: stone dwellings, grinding stones, dentalium beads, human burials and gazelle bones. As the climate became warmer and wetter, plants and animals more diverse and abundant, people stayed longer and returned earlier to their winter aggregation sites until some people remained all year round."
May 20, 2012
This book could have been far better than it turned out. The topic is hugely interesting and is constantly in flux, as new archaeological discoveries enter the field of knowledge. But the text is fatally flawed by a few poor decisions.
First among these is the choice to inject a fictional, 20th century, character into the mix, apparently as a way to describe Pleistocene/Holocene society in a relatable fashion. It ends up being incredibly distracting, repetitive, and (for me) a constant reminder that so much of what is being described is fairly speculative.
Which leads to the second issue - the endnotes, where far too many details about the reasons behind speculations (as well as a lot of interesting asides) are shunted. This is a personal quibble, but unless you're David Foster Wallace and the text is called Infinite Jest, I don't get the choice of endnotes over footnotes. It irks me.
Lastly, the text itself seems a bit disorganized. Even divided into regions (and why on earth is Mesopotamia grouped with South Asia?), things jump around in space and time without ever coming together in any kind of unified fashion. True, our knowledge of the time in question - 20,000 - 5,000 BCE - is fragmentary, but surely some sort of rough synthesis could have been possible.
All in all, a frustrating book. So much fascinating information, but presented in what is, to me, a deeply annoying fashion.
First among these is the choice to inject a fictional, 20th century, character into the mix, apparently as a way to describe Pleistocene/Holocene society in a relatable fashion. It ends up being incredibly distracting, repetitive, and (for me) a constant reminder that so much of what is being described is fairly speculative.
Which leads to the second issue - the endnotes, where far too many details about the reasons behind speculations (as well as a lot of interesting asides) are shunted. This is a personal quibble, but unless you're David Foster Wallace and the text is called Infinite Jest, I don't get the choice of endnotes over footnotes. It irks me.
Lastly, the text itself seems a bit disorganized. Even divided into regions (and why on earth is Mesopotamia grouped with South Asia?), things jump around in space and time without ever coming together in any kind of unified fashion. True, our knowledge of the time in question - 20,000 - 5,000 BCE - is fragmentary, but surely some sort of rough synthesis could have been possible.
All in all, a frustrating book. So much fascinating information, but presented in what is, to me, a deeply annoying fashion.
December 15, 2017
If you've wondered what humanity was up to between the last glacial maximum and the rise of "civilization" (always the most fun parts of the game of the same name), this is the book for you. Taking a global approach, since all we ever hear about is Europe, Mithen gives you the full dilly. Every continent is covered as well as the archaeological evidence allows for, he digs into controversies over interpreting data and isn't afraid to weigh in with his own ideas.
Climatology enthusiasts will be pleased, as will archaebotanists, if that's a thing--I think that's a thing--a lot of the text is give over to climate change, plants, and the roles all that played in the emergence of modern humans.
Minor quibbles: the text jumps around in time and space, which is kind of necessary but makes some sections a little confusing, especially the final section on Africa. Nice maps, but needs more illustrations, too!
Climatology enthusiasts will be pleased, as will archaebotanists, if that's a thing--I think that's a thing--a lot of the text is give over to climate change, plants, and the roles all that played in the emergence of modern humans.
Minor quibbles: the text jumps around in time and space, which is kind of necessary but makes some sections a little confusing, especially the final section on Africa. Nice maps, but needs more illustrations, too!
February 18, 2013
Review of hardback edition, originally published on my blog here in October 2004.
In the last few years, the understanding that professional archaeologists have of life in the prehistoric world has advanced rapidly, but the new ideas have generally been quite slow to filter through to the level of the interested amateur, apart from the odd newspaper article when a particularly sensational story has been unearthed, such as the disproving of the "Clovis first" theory about the earliest inhabitants of the American continent, or the exposing of the Philippine's Tasaday tribe as a hoax perpetrated by the Marcos regime for its own reasons. In After the Ice, Steve Mithen provides a popular account of the current state of archaeological knowledge and theory, a worldwide survey of the story of 15,000 years - a period which basically extends from the height of the last Ice Age to the earliest agricultural cultures.
In this sort of account, the difficulty is to make the past come alive - to turn the trenches back into huts, the bones into people - while being able to show the reasoning behind the reconstruction, the boundaries between knowledge and supposition, and also to explain something of the scientific techniques used in modern archaeological investigation. Mithen uses a particular device to overcome this difficulty: he writes about what would have been seen by a time traveller he names John Lubbock, named after a famous Victorian historian, who in his own book Pre Historic Times did something similar to After the Ice, although right at the start of the study of the prehistoric past: this was the book which introduced terms such as Palaeolithic and Neolithic. John Lubbock carries a copy of Prehistoric Times around with him, which makes it possible for Mithen to discuss just how much our ideas about the past have changed in the last century and a half (and also our attitudes to non-white people). This generally works quite well, only occasionally becoming irritating; far less so than a description of the device makes it sound.
Apart from those with an interest in the past for its own sake, why should anyone read After the Ice? Mithen makes a case for this by considering global warming. Through this fifteen thousand year period, global temperatures rose dramatically (though not as fast as they are now), and many of the changes in the archaeology can be linked to the environmental changes that were local effects of this. The drastic move to agriculture - it should be noted that the early farmers had poorer nutrition than the hunter gatherers they replaced - has had amassive (indeed, incalculable) social impact. This is some food for thought as we look to the next century, when global warming is likely to impact a world containing thousands of times as many people.
One minor irritation occurs in connection with the footnotes. A lot of the more technical detail is relegated to notes at the end of the book, and there are many readers who, like myself, will want to follow them as they progress through the main narrative. The problem is that there are frequent errors in the numbering of the notes which can make this a frustrating process. To take an example, in the last chapter the note referenced as 2 in the text appears as 6 in the endpapers, with the notes in between also incorrect (3-5 become 2-4). I hope this will be corrected in later editions.
After the Ice is a fascinating book, and is essential reading for anyone interested in the prehistoric past. Maybe in a decade or two it will be out of date; and in a century and a half it may well seem to be a naive, forgotten relic of the past like Prehistoric Times has become. But for now this is the history book of the year.
In the last few years, the understanding that professional archaeologists have of life in the prehistoric world has advanced rapidly, but the new ideas have generally been quite slow to filter through to the level of the interested amateur, apart from the odd newspaper article when a particularly sensational story has been unearthed, such as the disproving of the "Clovis first" theory about the earliest inhabitants of the American continent, or the exposing of the Philippine's Tasaday tribe as a hoax perpetrated by the Marcos regime for its own reasons. In After the Ice, Steve Mithen provides a popular account of the current state of archaeological knowledge and theory, a worldwide survey of the story of 15,000 years - a period which basically extends from the height of the last Ice Age to the earliest agricultural cultures.
In this sort of account, the difficulty is to make the past come alive - to turn the trenches back into huts, the bones into people - while being able to show the reasoning behind the reconstruction, the boundaries between knowledge and supposition, and also to explain something of the scientific techniques used in modern archaeological investigation. Mithen uses a particular device to overcome this difficulty: he writes about what would have been seen by a time traveller he names John Lubbock, named after a famous Victorian historian, who in his own book Pre Historic Times did something similar to After the Ice, although right at the start of the study of the prehistoric past: this was the book which introduced terms such as Palaeolithic and Neolithic. John Lubbock carries a copy of Prehistoric Times around with him, which makes it possible for Mithen to discuss just how much our ideas about the past have changed in the last century and a half (and also our attitudes to non-white people). This generally works quite well, only occasionally becoming irritating; far less so than a description of the device makes it sound.
Apart from those with an interest in the past for its own sake, why should anyone read After the Ice? Mithen makes a case for this by considering global warming. Through this fifteen thousand year period, global temperatures rose dramatically (though not as fast as they are now), and many of the changes in the archaeology can be linked to the environmental changes that were local effects of this. The drastic move to agriculture - it should be noted that the early farmers had poorer nutrition than the hunter gatherers they replaced - has had amassive (indeed, incalculable) social impact. This is some food for thought as we look to the next century, when global warming is likely to impact a world containing thousands of times as many people.
One minor irritation occurs in connection with the footnotes. A lot of the more technical detail is relegated to notes at the end of the book, and there are many readers who, like myself, will want to follow them as they progress through the main narrative. The problem is that there are frequent errors in the numbering of the notes which can make this a frustrating process. To take an example, in the last chapter the note referenced as 2 in the text appears as 6 in the endpapers, with the notes in between also incorrect (3-5 become 2-4). I hope this will be corrected in later editions.
After the Ice is a fascinating book, and is essential reading for anyone interested in the prehistoric past. Maybe in a decade or two it will be out of date; and in a century and a half it may well seem to be a naive, forgotten relic of the past like Prehistoric Times has become. But for now this is the history book of the year.
February 16, 2016
Well I struggled through to the end of this, but only because the subject matter is so interesting and there are so few non-specialist books available.
Mithen likes to paint little pictures of life as it might have been in prehistory. That in itself is fine, except that it's not always clear what is based on hard evidence and what is pure conjecture. I found myself having to re-read passages or search the footnotes to try to figure it out.
Even worse is the supremely annoying presence in these vignettes of John Lubbock; a fictional, time-traveling anthropologist ghost. It's distracting and condescending. This mistake is compounded by the decision to give him the same name as an actual (Victorian) prehistorian, who is also often referred to in the text, which means having to awkwardly distinguish between the two the whole way through.
It's not surprising that the author's particular field (archaeology) will colour a work like this, but here genetic and linguistic evidence are skimmed over with unseemly haste, and aren't mentioned at all for many chapters at a time. This is important. For example, I know from other books that there is a surprising diversity of indigenous language families in one small corner in the north-west of Australia, yet just one language family accounts for the entire remainder of the continent. This is intriguing and unexplained. But it isn't mentioned, even in passing, in any of the chapters covering Australia.
Mithen likes to paint little pictures of life as it might have been in prehistory. That in itself is fine, except that it's not always clear what is based on hard evidence and what is pure conjecture. I found myself having to re-read passages or search the footnotes to try to figure it out.
Even worse is the supremely annoying presence in these vignettes of John Lubbock; a fictional, time-traveling anthropologist ghost. It's distracting and condescending. This mistake is compounded by the decision to give him the same name as an actual (Victorian) prehistorian, who is also often referred to in the text, which means having to awkwardly distinguish between the two the whole way through.
It's not surprising that the author's particular field (archaeology) will colour a work like this, but here genetic and linguistic evidence are skimmed over with unseemly haste, and aren't mentioned at all for many chapters at a time. This is important. For example, I know from other books that there is a surprising diversity of indigenous language families in one small corner in the north-west of Australia, yet just one language family accounts for the entire remainder of the continent. This is intriguing and unexplained. But it isn't mentioned, even in passing, in any of the chapters covering Australia.
June 17, 2023
Reviews archaeological evidence concerning the period 20,000 BC to 5000 BC, covering all the continents. Very encyclopedic and at time quite interesting, I have two complaints which almost made it a one star review. The author uses a fictional character , John Lubbock, who travels to each of the sites named (and there are dozens of them), and describes what he sees when the sites were actually in use. I found this technique detracted from the book. Besides that, Lubbock seems to travel criss cross across the prehistoric world in no particular order, except by continent. I found this very confusing,as the time periods involved were jumbled, making the timeline difficult to follow. My other criticism is the lack of diagrams. An awful lot of the sites had very similar findings, and while the author felt the need to give us a detailed word picture of some of the finds, especially all the different types of microliths, I would have found a picture much clearer. Oh, well. Glad I finished it, and have it on the shelf to refer back to, when I read other articles or books concerning this period of archaeology.
August 25, 2011
An amazing look, and in some ways, seminal look into the very earliest parts of human history. Mithen's work is oddly presented in the form of a journey through time by a fictional character, but the meat of the scholarship is found in the author-asides that explain how the fictional scenes were extrapolated from the very real archaeological evidence from the various sites. The book is daring in its scale, not many authors would be brave enough to try and cover fifteen thousand years of history in a 600-odd page book, but Mithen does not leave the feel that much has been overlooked. Another good point about Mithen is that he is consistent in telling us how various kinds of evidence are analysed by historians to reach the conclusions that are drawn. In some cases the explanations get very technical indeed, but the transparency of process that is usually not found in history books means that even if Mithen's work is ever rendered obsolete in its conclusions, it will remain timeless as a source of evidence.
Read
September 18, 2024After the Ice was a highly comprehensive and nearly encyclopedic book about the lives of our ancestors. It beautifully describes the transition from the Paleolithic to the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in various locations around the world. It's also fascinating to see how many different food sources were domesticated in different regions of our planet. The lives of these people were certainly no walk in the park and required a great deal of expertise. If our current human species, with our knowledge of the present, were transported back to 20,000 BC, we would not survive without the assistance of the people who populated the Earth during that time. Therefore, it is, in my opinion, incorrect to refer to these ancient humans as 'primitive.' The Stone Age inhabitants were undoubtedly resourceful, courageous, and intelligent. In conclusion, it's a wonderful book, although it could have benefitted from more tables, illustrations, and photographs
January 10, 2021
Ця книжка намагається розповісти про "передісторію" людства на всіх континентах і всіх широтах, без традиційного західного ухилу. Дотримуючись академічних стандартів (тут безліч приміток з посиланнями та застереженнями про суперечливі моменти), автор тим не менш дає волю фантазії і намагається відтворити побут, культуру і релігію первісних людей, наскільки це дозволяють мізерні археологічні знахідки. Паралельно він розповідає про історію клімату, вимирання мамонтів та інших великих тварин, палкі дискусії щодо перших мешканців Америки і багато всього іншого, що безпосередньо стосується теми і без чого неможливо скласти уявлення про світ тих часів.
Книжка не завжди дуже легко читається, а побут людей на різних континентах інколи виявляється занадто подібним, щоб знову про нього читати, але загалом мені сподобалось.
Книжка не завжди дуже легко читається, а побут людей на різних континентах інколи виявляється занадто подібним, щоб знову про нього читати, але загалом мені сподобалось.
March 3, 2018
This has been my dip-in-and-out of book for the past few months. I didn’t intend it to be so, but ARC’s kept on popping up and the requisite read-and-review commitments along with them. I think I would’ve preferred to have read it as one continuous narrative, as by the end a couple of the sites mentioned earlier in the book were a little hazy, but it does work read in this way – each chapter covers a certain region and range in time, making it quite digestible in one or two chapter chunks.
Mithen takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of human life across the globe between 20,000 and 5000 BCE, a period known as the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age. Mithen’s interest is that this is a period of great change and upheaval that saw the end of the ice age, the transition to the landscapes and climates we know today, and, for humanity, the transition from a lifestyle of nomadic hunter-gathering to domestication and settled communities in many, but not all, parts of the world. It’s a big topic, and the book certainly did feel extensive at times (and once you’ve finished the book the endnotes take up the rest of the pages – a whopping third), but I felt that Mithen argues his case well. I certainly found the topic very interesting, and it was fascinating to delve even deeper into a subject with which I am already reasonably familiar, but by no means an expert. As far as I know, Mithen’s book is the only one that specifically focuses on the Mesolithic whilst providing an overall global view.
However, what makes this a good book is not just an interesting subject matter; it’s how Mithen writes it. Mithen alternates his dry academic discussions, which provide the serious material an academic like me is interested in, with vivid descriptions and reimaginings of Mesolithic peoples, which provide the stimulation the reader in me needs to become engrossed in a book. The author has taken a bit of criticism for his fictional scenes, but to my academic’s critical eye he writes them very carefully, explaining in his factual sections where and why he adds dubious details. This style has been done to great effect by others in this field before; namely, Brian Fagan’s Cro-Magnon. Personally I feel it adds something to the liveliness of the narrative, and may help the casual reader get into what might other be a fairly dry, inscrutable topic. As part of his fictional sections, Mithen uses a modern day guide, called John Lubbock, named after a Victorian writer on the same topic. As other reviewers have commented, I too found this slightly ridiculous and hokey at first and was sure I wouldn’t like it; but in actuality Lubbock is a silent, invisible guide who is more of a modern touchstone viewpoint than a glaring intruder. I can’t help noting the irony of the fact that I find Mithen and Fagan’s brief fictional scenes in their non-fiction works about Stone Age life far more vivid and compelling than Jean Auel’s plodding Earth’s Children series.
All in all, I have no hesitation in recommending this book.
10 out of 10
June 21, 2021
I wanted a solid foundation in pre-history... and ended up with a 3-level underground car park of Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic knowledge. This book discusses all global major sites in sometimes great detail. I have learnt far more than I had bargained for, and in this sense it really opened up an entire field of science for me - I am now excited by the evolution of flintstone designs(!) and understand the entire logic of pre-historic archaeology
Downsides:
A) the book starts at the end of the last Ice-Age which is useful - but I am now missing quite a few 100k years of human cultural evolution still (mind you the book title gave that away).
B) there is a SIGNIFICANT gap between where this book stops (people in little huts with maybe a domesticated goat or two) and where proper civilisation kicks off in Mesopotamia (kings, large towns, wars, bureaucracy etc) and I now need to find a book that covers for that (this one the author could have gone further into for sure in the timeframe given)
C) This literary style of a local observer that takes you through the site is a bit weird to be honest
D) the book is dated - I am sure that a lot of stuff has happened in the last 30 years in this field
Not for the impatient speed-reader
Downsides:
A) the book starts at the end of the last Ice-Age which is useful - but I am now missing quite a few 100k years of human cultural evolution still (mind you the book title gave that away).
B) there is a SIGNIFICANT gap between where this book stops (people in little huts with maybe a domesticated goat or two) and where proper civilisation kicks off in Mesopotamia (kings, large towns, wars, bureaucracy etc) and I now need to find a book that covers for that (this one the author could have gone further into for sure in the timeframe given)
C) This literary style of a local observer that takes you through the site is a bit weird to be honest
D) the book is dated - I am sure that a lot of stuff has happened in the last 30 years in this field
Not for the impatient speed-reader
June 13, 2023
After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC by Steven Mithen (Harvard University Press 2003) (930) (3814).
This is a most interesting book about the period of human history beginning in 20,000 BC. This is the generally accepted date of the high point of Earth’s last ice age. Author Steven Mithen has written a book which engagingly combines informational threads about recent discoveries and developments in the fields of archaeology, human genetics, and environmental science to tell the story of the most recent 15,000 years of human history.
Mithen has cleverly styled this survey of history as the story of a time traveler-eyewitness named "John Lubbock." In this tale, John Lubbock is a witness to much of prehistory, but he is a passive presence and an unseen observer as he experiences the activities of early humans. While Steven Mithen’s fictional character John Lubbock serves as the vicarious eyes and ears of modern man in Mithen’s telling, Mithen based John Lubbock on an actual Victorian-era polymath of the same name who was a scientist, an explorer, and the author of the 1865 scholarly tome Pre-Historic Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manner and Customs of Modern Savages.
The book is arranged chronologically to cover the developments that occurred during the entire historical period from 20,000-5000 BC and discusses the growth on each continent in turn. Steven Mithen’s John Lubbock thus experiences and then recounts for readers the historical progress of the humans on each continent in sequence.
I was particularly interested in the section about the Clovis people and the Monte Verde site in the Americas. (I’m a casual relic-hunting hobbyist.)
This book appeals on many levels. The author’s logic and reasoning both seem sound and credible. I’m glad I found this one.
My rating: 7/10, finished 6/12/23 (3814).
Read
January 2, 2025I found this fascinating: windows into the depths of the past, glimpses of far-distant cultures and societies all but lost to time. It made for captivating—and frequently sublime—reading. This was partly because the subject matter was, for someone like me, so intrinsically stirring and poignant; but it's also because the author is so intentional about drawing out these qualities. He does something I wish all authors of archaeologically-centered history books would do: describes places, events, objects, landscapes, weather (etc.) as if they were living moments, painting vivid pictures of probable past scenes and situations. The author does this so well that I did not at first even notice the grievous absence of two topics—the languages of these ancienter-than-ancient cultures, and their myths. These things are now lost beyond recall—what I wouldn't give to know something of them!
November 3, 2023
Slightly outdated, especially when it comes to the Americas. But I’m so impressed with Mithen’s ability to put together this massive project. Plus, it’s a gateway into the archaeology of cultures we never get to study in the west, such as Australia, Japan, Indonesia, South-East Asia and more. Could’ve used a lot more photos though. My favourite chapters were on the Nautufians and Star-Carr.
September 24, 2010
I must admit that when I first started reading this book I was put off by the manner in which Mithen provided information. The insertion of a fictional character with the same name as a Victorian age author who published a book about early archeology and sociology was hard to place within the well-researched and insightful history. Even now I find myself tempted to discuss this abstraction rather than the meat of the book, though I must admit that it accomplishes his desire to both show how views of the time evolved and give a more personal understanding of the sites themselves.
With that said, the shear breadth of this book is enormous. Mithen spares little detail in discussing how archeology determined the facts of the sites uncovered. At various times he delves into phytoliths and how as inorganic material remnants of plants it helped to determine fauna, why the cave paintings seemed to cease after 10,000BC in Europe after a 20,000 year history, and how wild and cultivated crops developed in different societies and the time of their introduction. In addition he provides great detail on weather change and how the historical weather conditions were determined and most importantly how that shaped the world between 20,000 and 5,000 BC.
In the end I enjoyed the science of discovery and the educated speculation more than the artificial gimmick bothered me. Anyone who has read any of Mithen’s other books let me know which one you recommend most and why. I’ll add it to the growing list.
With that said, the shear breadth of this book is enormous. Mithen spares little detail in discussing how archeology determined the facts of the sites uncovered. At various times he delves into phytoliths and how as inorganic material remnants of plants it helped to determine fauna, why the cave paintings seemed to cease after 10,000BC in Europe after a 20,000 year history, and how wild and cultivated crops developed in different societies and the time of their introduction. In addition he provides great detail on weather change and how the historical weather conditions were determined and most importantly how that shaped the world between 20,000 and 5,000 BC.
In the end I enjoyed the science of discovery and the educated speculation more than the artificial gimmick bothered me. Anyone who has read any of Mithen’s other books let me know which one you recommend most and why. I’ll add it to the growing list.
August 9, 2021
我原本對史前史和考古是十分有興趣
見到這書的介紹馬上就有興趣
不過看這本書的時候反而十分痛苦
很像怎看都完不了的感覺
篇幅超長 而且有點流水賬的感覺
看了近一個月才能完成
這本書對於認識全球史前的overview 係有用的
可是書本已經是20多年前的作品
有很多觀點和發現已經不太合時
E.g 人類multi-origin 還是非洲單一起源論
而且非常缺乏圖表/地圖/圖片
以致對好多概念都不能有全面的認識
亦都沒好清楚表達文化傳統方向,方法和各地方之間的影響和交流
我個人認為史前史寫得比較好反而是中國歷史長河中的第一本 但就當然就只論述了中國史前史的部分
見到這書的介紹馬上就有興趣
不過看這本書的時候反而十分痛苦
很像怎看都完不了的感覺
篇幅超長 而且有點流水賬的感覺
看了近一個月才能完成
這本書對於認識全球史前的overview 係有用的
可是書本已經是20多年前的作品
有很多觀點和發現已經不太合時
E.g 人類multi-origin 還是非洲單一起源論
而且非常缺乏圖表/地圖/圖片
以致對好多概念都不能有全面的認識
亦都沒好清楚表達文化傳統方向,方法和各地方之間的影響和交流
我個人認為史前史寫得比較好反而是中國歷史長河中的第一本 但就當然就只論述了中國史前史的部分
February 1, 2019
It took me several months to get through this book because it's so dense and packed with information, but it was really fascinating and well written. I especially enjoyed the imagined descriptions of these archaeological sites as they might have once been. Really a great resource if you want to know what it was like to live in the Mesolithic era.
July 14, 2021
Who, he thinks, would be a town-dwelling farmer rather than a hunter-gatherer? Having travelled through all but one of the world’s continents he knows the answer: almost everyone in the prehistoric world. [loc. 9624]
A survey of history before anything was written down, covering the period from the Last Glacial Maximum to the establishment of farming. To bring archaeological, ecological and geological discoveries to life, Mithen invents an invisible observer who observes life on each continent (except Antarctica) over this period of fifteen millennia. This observer's name is John Lubbock, named after the Victorian author of Prehistoric Times (1865), a work that was groundbreaking for its time but nevertheless portrayed our ancestors as savages with undeveloped minds. Lubbock, in After the Ice, can 'travel in the same manner as an archaeologist digs – seeing the most intimate details of people’s lives but being unable to ask any questions and with his presence quite unknown' [loc. 254]. I ended up feeling immensely sorry for Lubbock, especially when he'd been waiting for centuries for people to return to a site ... "Lubbock leaves his seat in 7000 BC, breaking through the dense mat of grass and shrubs that has bound him to the floor." [loc. 8943]
Mithen provides a thorough survey of archaeological discoveries from the last Ice Age, through the Younger Dryas (another cold period around 9000 BC), to the rapid warming that facilitated cultivation and farming. He emphasises, both in the main body of the text and in his Afterword, the role of climate change in human history. Rapid rises in global temperatures -- 7o in a decade around 9600BC, for instance -- drastically altered the ecology: species became extinct, areas became unliveable, land became sea, people moved on. I was especially intrigued by the prehistory of the Nile: the river is now fed by the Blue and White Niles, but the latter was blocked off by sand dunes between 20,000 BC and 12,500 BC, while the former had less flow due to shorter wet seasons. Global warming, increased rainfall and the erosion of the sand dunes led to the 'Wild Nile', with faster flow, narrower floodplain and massive depopulation.
At that point, most, if not all, humans lived as hunter-gatherers, moving with the seasons, perhaps planting seeds in the spring but not hanging around to wait for the harvest. (Africa and Australia, Mithen points out, were so well-endowed with edible plants that there was no need to cultivate anything until well after farming had taken root, ha, in Europe and Asia.) The hunter-gatherer people portrayed here do seem to have a healthier and less industrious existence than those who settled, farmed and built towns. (For values of 'town' including anything from four or five huts upwards.) Settling means territory: territory means overcrowding, conflict, an us-and-them mentality. Though at least there is plenty of evidence to be found in the places where early humans lived: farming, it seems, was invented well before tidying up, and a great many of the finds discussed are objects or remains that have been left lying, or pushed aside into corners.
There are some fascinating insights, observations and theories in After the Ice. Phallic pestles; beetles indicating a maximum summer temperature of 10o in Britain at the Last Glacial Maximum; children and adults buried within the walls and floors of houses; modern-day non-Indo-European languages (Basque, Finnish) reflecting areas where the Mesolithic inhabitants lingered and mixed with the Neolithic; the oral histories of Australian Aborigines which may reflect events of ten or twenty thousand years ago.
Though human history progressed (?) along similar lines in many different regions -- pottery 'evolved' several times, as did farming, religion and various improvements to basic tools -- the vignettes of life observed by Lubbock (based on specific archaeological discoveries, such as graves) and the discussion of various theories kept the narrative fresh and readable, and prevented it from feeling repetitive. Mithen's Afterword is thoughtful and relevant, a good discussion of anthropogenic climate change: perhaps more controversial on first publication, in 2002, than it is now.
Are the delights of the microscope, the thoughts of Darwin, the poetry of Shakespeare and the advances of medical science, sufficient recompense for the environmental degradation, social conflict and human suffering that ultimately derive from the origin of farming 10,000 years ago? [loc. 11252]
January 25, 2016
It is just too huge, and to be honest if you attempt to read it cover to cover all the groups merge into each other with insufficient difference to really hold the reader. He gives roughly equal number of chapters to each of the continents and so by the time he is on Australia it seems that the story has already been told, the differences are more minor.I also actively disliked the narrative trick of including the Victorian paleo-anthropologist John Lubbock as a observer/ driver - clunky and just intrusive without adding anything.
December 22, 2018
This covers the world history of mankind from 20,000 to 5,000--from the last Ice Age to (in favored locations) the Neolithic and the beginning of government. The tale is told through the eyes of a fellow named Lubbock (named after a Victorian proto-prehistorian), who wanders through each continent over this time period, unaffected by time or distance or hunger, though he does eat off the land from time to time, perhaps out of a sense of solidarity with the locals. He visits the sites that later archaeologists will excavate, describing how they looked in life (with details filled in by imagination, pretty plausibly as far as I can tell). He visits the camps and villages, enters the dwellings and huts, samples some of the food and even helps with some of the simpler chores, all somehow without being noticed. Of course, this means he spends more time at burials and in caves than was perhaps typical of people of those ages, since those sites were better preserved for 20th- and 21st-century archaeologists. Lubbock seems unaffected by time or distance, and sometimes waits in one place for hundreds of years until his next site is ready, then rouses himself like Rip Van Winkle, shaking off the dust and tearing off the vines to go on his way. It's all great fun, and regular asides give us the archeologist's view of the site also.
Two annoyances: (1) The author indulges in the idea that life was better in the paleolithic, an idea I think one would abandon at the first toothache or bout of strep throat. He laments the growth of "inequality" when everyone was getting better off. (2) He gives regular sermons on the dangers of Global Warming. Maybe he is right, but it is not his subject, and I am tired of being lectured on this subject. Interestingly, he does inform us that the earth underwent a global warming of 7 deg C in 50 years around 9600 BC purely from natural causes, more than twice the increase predicted in 100 years from current GW.
Two annoyances: (1) The author indulges in the idea that life was better in the paleolithic, an idea I think one would abandon at the first toothache or bout of strep throat. He laments the growth of "inequality" when everyone was getting better off. (2) He gives regular sermons on the dangers of Global Warming. Maybe he is right, but it is not his subject, and I am tired of being lectured on this subject. Interestingly, he does inform us that the earth underwent a global warming of 7 deg C in 50 years around 9600 BC purely from natural causes, more than twice the increase predicted in 100 years from current GW.
October 16, 2022
I enjoyed this very much, and it often stimulated me to further research. Inevitably, however, this often revealed that things have changed since the book was published in 2003. For example, I was fascinated by the description of Azilian painted pebbles. These Mesolithic pebbles dating perhaps from 10,000 BC have intriguing symbols and patterns on them. What can they mean? Of course, we can never know for sure, but it was disturbing to note from the British Museum website that large numbers of these pebbles are now considered modern fakes – maybe as many as 90% of them. This has only come to light since Mithen’s book was written.
Mithen also describes Japanese Jomon pottery which I was fascinated to learn is maybe 6,000 years older than the earliest pottery found anywhere else. Except that since this book came out, pottery has been found in China dating from perhaps 18,000 BC, which makes it even older than Jomon, possibly by more than 3,000 years.
Of course, it is only to be expected that all books such as this will become outdated in certain respects, as new discoveries push our knowledge even further. This doesn’t detract from the book’s fascination. Mithen does employ one device which other reviewers have found annoying and which I had mixed feelings about too: a time travelling modern archaeologist who sits like a kind of ghost as he observes ancient humans and their environment. This is a risky device and I can understand why some would find it distracting. On the other hand, it does give Mithen the opportunity to give us some really lyrical and evocative descriptions. A dry catalogue of bits of stone and bone cannot bring the past to life in the same way. When so much is mysterious and unknowable, imaginative connections can be deeply stirring. At least I find it so.
Mithen also describes Japanese Jomon pottery which I was fascinated to learn is maybe 6,000 years older than the earliest pottery found anywhere else. Except that since this book came out, pottery has been found in China dating from perhaps 18,000 BC, which makes it even older than Jomon, possibly by more than 3,000 years.
Of course, it is only to be expected that all books such as this will become outdated in certain respects, as new discoveries push our knowledge even further. This doesn’t detract from the book’s fascination. Mithen does employ one device which other reviewers have found annoying and which I had mixed feelings about too: a time travelling modern archaeologist who sits like a kind of ghost as he observes ancient humans and their environment. This is a risky device and I can understand why some would find it distracting. On the other hand, it does give Mithen the opportunity to give us some really lyrical and evocative descriptions. A dry catalogue of bits of stone and bone cannot bring the past to life in the same way. When so much is mysterious and unknowable, imaginative connections can be deeply stirring. At least I find it so.
May 16, 2020
Whew! This took a while to get through (mainly because I was only reading it before bed each evening), but even so, it takes a while to digest all the information contained in these 500+ pages. I found the author's approach of taking a modern observer and placing him in those pre-historic settings helpful and enlightening. By re-creating scenes from those era (based on solid research and archaeological finds/digs), the reader is better able to understand what life was like for those early people. Admittedly, there is some artistic licence taken - some fanciful imaginings - but on the whole it helps to paint an interesting overview of how the world changed and how mankind adapted to it. There is a lot of fascinating information contained within the covers and it was time well spent in reading.
March 26, 2023
A brilliant introduction to global archeological knowledge at the point it was written in the early 2000s. Provides a fascinating and fast-paced account focusing on specific sight in regions across the world. The account of the colonisation of North America was a particular highlight, particularly the discussion of megafauna.
Personally, I disliked the somewhat disorientating attempt to use the time-travelling 'John Lubbock' to 'see' the archeological sights in their time. Despite this, a good book.
Personally, I disliked the somewhat disorientating attempt to use the time-travelling 'John Lubbock' to 'see' the archeological sights in their time. Despite this, a good book.
March 23, 2025
This covers the period of 20,000 to 5,000 BCE when Homo sapiens (around 1 million of whom were alive at this time) transformed from hunter-gatherers into agriculturalists. It’s an accessible look at each continent individually, going through the history evidenced by various archaeological sites, and contains a map of each continent with the sites listed.
By the time we get to the Americas it’s a little more dry/academic and it does become repetitive after a while: you get the feeling even the author was finding it tough to be as excited about the book. There’s a section at the end that talks about current climate change and how it might differ from the climate change experienced during the time period of this book.
By the time we get to the Americas it’s a little more dry/academic and it does become repetitive after a while: you get the feeling even the author was finding it tough to be as excited about the book. There’s a section at the end that talks about current climate change and how it might differ from the climate change experienced during the time period of this book.
June 23, 2025
A comprehensive review of the Earth and our antecedents after the ice and moving into our current climate. That he covers what happened in so many different places gives us a panopticon of homo sapiens development.
Thank you Stephen Mithen
Thank you Stephen Mithen
July 22, 2018
After The Ice provides a summary of current archaeological thinking about the Mesolithic and Neolithic Periods since the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM) which occurred about 22,000 years ago until 5000 BC. The 511 pages are divided into sections for areas around the globe: the Western Asia (Fertile Crescent), Europe, the Americas, Australia and East Asia, South Asia (India and the Middle East) and Africa. Within each section, chapters describe the findings of archaeological digs at selected sites which provide clues to the cultures of Homo sapiens. These sections are prefaced with two chapters describing carbon dating, the possible cause of ice ages (the Milankovitch cycles), and the global warming since the Late Glacial Maximum about 22,000 years ago. His focus is on the
transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to the agricultural revolution. His conclusion is that the agricultural revolution began in Western Asia, probably in the Jordan Valley. I did not read the sections about Eastern Asia, Australia and Africa. Mithen does not always identify the cultures found at these sites by name beyond the general types Neolithic and Mesolithic.
He uses a fictional character to 'experience' (as a ghost in a time-travel story) an imagining of how the discovered artifacts were produced in order to bring the sites to life. John Lubbock is the name is of an actual archaeologist who wrote 'Prehistoric Times' in the late 19th century and inspired the author to study archaeology. He applies this name to the fictional ghost archaeologist. An appendix of chapter footnotes is provided along with his extensive bibliography and an index. The Harvard University Press edition also has three sections of color photographs. Area maps preface each geographic region, showing the locations of the sites mentioned.
My motive for reading this book was to learn of Northern European developments in this time period, to discover the origins of my German ancestry. Mithen says that hunter-gatherers from Scandanavia inhabited northern Europe after the ice age ended. Indo-Europeans from the Hungarian plains are credited with bringing the agricultural revolution to Europe, not by conquest but by infiltration. The original inhabitants adopted the agricultural practices, maybe not as peacefully as the author implies.
I learned about the Younger Dryas cool period which slowed cultural evolution around the world about a thousand years after the thawing of the glaciers had begun, the lifestyles of the Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, where domestication of grains and animals seem to have occurred and about
when, the types of shelters used, burial practices, carbon dating technology, the ancient age of the Amazonian rainforest and much more. Neolithic peoples' use of language is assumed as well as singing and dancing, since the invisible John Lubbock visitor so reports even though there must be scant evidence in the artefacts found. Also learned was the conviction that the Jordan Valley area is
the original home of agriculture and pastoralism, apparently preceding Mesopotamia and Egypt. Several times Mithen writes that 'warm and wet' conditions favored agriculture and that 'cold and dry' conditions favored hunting and gathering. Also predicted are more frequent El Nino conditions
due to global warming. The contributions of historical linguistics to the study of humanity's development are briefly considered, but I sense that the author considers them to be 'soft data'. DNA analysis is more carefully considered and its evidence carries more weight with him.
The author is good at crediting the archaelogists that excavated the many sites that were chosen to portray cultural developments. This gives a reader the opportunity to check on other interpretations of these sites. Several controversial sites are described and usually Mithen chooses to be conservative. An example is the North American Meadowcroft site which claims a date of
16,000 BC for its findings. Mithen and others question whether the carbon particles analyzed are from the cooking fire or perhaps from the numerous coal deposits nearby. Also the animal bones found at Meadowcroft are not those of tundra mammals but of woodland mammals. So as of the publishing date of 2004, Mithen was sticking to 11,500 BC date of the many Clovis sites
for the earliest date of Native Americans in North America. The Monte Verde site in southern Peru, he accepts as valid for 12,500 BC for South America. But evidence for an earlier occupation about 33,000 BC, he considers inconclusive and controversial.
Dr Steven Mithen is a professor of archaeology at the University of Reading who has excavated some sites himself and apparently visited many of them. This book is an excellent resource for anyone who is curious about prehistorical human cultures and the beginnings of the agricultural revolution. It also creates an appreciation for the ramifications of climate changes such as
the global warming trend we seem to be in now.
transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to the agricultural revolution. His conclusion is that the agricultural revolution began in Western Asia, probably in the Jordan Valley. I did not read the sections about Eastern Asia, Australia and Africa. Mithen does not always identify the cultures found at these sites by name beyond the general types Neolithic and Mesolithic.
He uses a fictional character to 'experience' (as a ghost in a time-travel story) an imagining of how the discovered artifacts were produced in order to bring the sites to life. John Lubbock is the name is of an actual archaeologist who wrote 'Prehistoric Times' in the late 19th century and inspired the author to study archaeology. He applies this name to the fictional ghost archaeologist. An appendix of chapter footnotes is provided along with his extensive bibliography and an index. The Harvard University Press edition also has three sections of color photographs. Area maps preface each geographic region, showing the locations of the sites mentioned.
My motive for reading this book was to learn of Northern European developments in this time period, to discover the origins of my German ancestry. Mithen says that hunter-gatherers from Scandanavia inhabited northern Europe after the ice age ended. Indo-Europeans from the Hungarian plains are credited with bringing the agricultural revolution to Europe, not by conquest but by infiltration. The original inhabitants adopted the agricultural practices, maybe not as peacefully as the author implies.
I learned about the Younger Dryas cool period which slowed cultural evolution around the world about a thousand years after the thawing of the glaciers had begun, the lifestyles of the Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, where domestication of grains and animals seem to have occurred and about
when, the types of shelters used, burial practices, carbon dating technology, the ancient age of the Amazonian rainforest and much more. Neolithic peoples' use of language is assumed as well as singing and dancing, since the invisible John Lubbock visitor so reports even though there must be scant evidence in the artefacts found. Also learned was the conviction that the Jordan Valley area is
the original home of agriculture and pastoralism, apparently preceding Mesopotamia and Egypt. Several times Mithen writes that 'warm and wet' conditions favored agriculture and that 'cold and dry' conditions favored hunting and gathering. Also predicted are more frequent El Nino conditions
due to global warming. The contributions of historical linguistics to the study of humanity's development are briefly considered, but I sense that the author considers them to be 'soft data'. DNA analysis is more carefully considered and its evidence carries more weight with him.
The author is good at crediting the archaelogists that excavated the many sites that were chosen to portray cultural developments. This gives a reader the opportunity to check on other interpretations of these sites. Several controversial sites are described and usually Mithen chooses to be conservative. An example is the North American Meadowcroft site which claims a date of
16,000 BC for its findings. Mithen and others question whether the carbon particles analyzed are from the cooking fire or perhaps from the numerous coal deposits nearby. Also the animal bones found at Meadowcroft are not those of tundra mammals but of woodland mammals. So as of the publishing date of 2004, Mithen was sticking to 11,500 BC date of the many Clovis sites
for the earliest date of Native Americans in North America. The Monte Verde site in southern Peru, he accepts as valid for 12,500 BC for South America. But evidence for an earlier occupation about 33,000 BC, he considers inconclusive and controversial.
Dr Steven Mithen is a professor of archaeology at the University of Reading who has excavated some sites himself and apparently visited many of them. This book is an excellent resource for anyone who is curious about prehistorical human cultures and the beginnings of the agricultural revolution. It also creates an appreciation for the ramifications of climate changes such as
the global warming trend we seem to be in now.
August 13, 2025
Not a fan of the time travelling chap
Displaying 1 - 30 of 143 reviews