After the Ice

622

An important book that is also a pleasure to read. I have been surprised and delighted by this book which is underpinned by excellent analysis and all round first-rate scholarship.

The author takes us on a journey through the fifteen thousand years from the last glaciation and follows the profound changes that humanity underwent, the challenges we undertook and the decisions we made as our ancestors developed cultures and behaviours totally unlike those of the paleolithic past.

This is a thick book of more than 600 pages, with unexpected detail and clean analysis on the minutae of life, always based on sound archaeological evidence.

To provide narrative flow Mithen allows himself the literary conceit of occassionally dropping an imaginary 20th Century explorer into the sites under discussion, the better to interpret the soocial profundity of some of the events being explored. These narrative breaks are ocassionally jarring but more often than not, work well to 'humanise' the material remains we discover as we travel accross the near east, western europe and beyond, following our ancestors who were in turn following the retreating ice.

I give it a full five out of five, and belive you will not be dissappointed.

Buy this book from