Out there, the book of the week seems to be The World Without Us, a consideration of how the world would evolve if the plague of human beings was abruptly removed from it. I saw it first waiting for the Harry Potter distribution to start. (See, Harry really does stimulate other reading!) Then a flood of publicity about it started in the media the next morning. (See, other books can survive the Harry onslaught).
But on my reading pile, the book is After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC by a British anthropologist named Steven Mithen (Harvard UP, 2004). That's our ancestors he is talking about, and what brilliant talk. The whole human journey up to the start of written history, laid out in one lively serious book -- I'm hooked. (Even though he thinks Bluefish Caves, Yukon, is in Alaska.)
Mithen notes that cave painting must be the longest art tradition in human history -- about 800 generations 35,000 BC to 10,000 BC. But it's not ahistorical. There was a unified tradition that covered a broad swath of southern Europe from Spain to the Urals, suggesting communication and information exchange. But then the climate changed, and cave painting stopped dead. Probably the weather got better, game became abundant, groups of people did not need to plan and consult on their hunting, they all went their own ways -- and the shared art tradition just stopped.
He tries to focus on the history, on the past -- but the evidence of the extraordinary work of generations of archaeologists constructing this history is pretty amazing too.
Interesting: the most mysterious aspect of human prehistory is still the Americas. Suddenly it's 11,000 or 12,000 BC and people are all over the Americas. But the initial peopling of the Americas is still almost entirely conjectural.
