After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC

by Steven Mithen

Overview

20,000 BC, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674019997
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2006
Pages:	664
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.60(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Steven Mithen is Professor of Early Prehistory and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Reading.

Table of Contents

	Preface	xi
	The Beginning
1	The Birth of History: Global warming, archaeological evidence and human history	3
2	The World at 20,000 BC: Human evolution, the causes of climate change and radiocarbon dating	8
	Western Asia
3	Fires and Flowers: Hunter-gatherers and the forest steppe, 20,000-12,300 BC	20
4	Village Life in the Oak Woodland: Early Natufian hunter-gatherer communities, 12,300-10,800 BC	29
5	On the Banks of the Euphrates: Abu Hureyra and the rise of hunter-gatherer sedentism, 12,300-10,800 BC	40
6	One Thousand Years of Drought: Economy and society during the Younger Dryas, 10,800-9600 BC	46
7	The Founding of Jericho: Neolithic architecture, burial and technology of the Jordan valley, 9600-8500 BC	56
8	Pictograms and Pillars: Neolithic ideology, symbolism and trade, 9600-8500 BC	62
9	In the Valley of Ravens: Architecture, textiles and animal domestication, 8500-7500 BC	72
10	The Town of Ghosts: Ritual, religion and economic collapse, 7500-6300 BC	80
11	Heaven and Hell at Catalhoyuk: Florescence of the Neolithic in Turkey, 9000-7000 BC	88
12	Three Days on Cyprus: Extinctions, colonisation and cultural stasis, 20,000-6000 BC	97
	Europe
13	Pioneers in Northern Lands: The recolonisation of northwest Europe, 20,000-12,700 BC	110
14	With Reindeer Hunters: Economy, technology and society, 12,700-9600 BC	122
15	At Star Carr: Adaptations to early Holocene woodlands in northern Europe, 9600-8500 BC	134
16	Last of the Cave Painters: Economic, social and cultural change in southern Europe, 9600-8500 BC	143
17	Coastal Catastrophe: Sea-level change and its consequences, 10,500-6400 BC	150
18	Two Villages in Southeast Europe: Sedentary hunter-gatherers and immigrant farmers, 6500-6200 BC	158
19	Islands of the Dead: Mesolithic burial and society in northern Europe, 6200-5000 BC	168
20	At the Frontier: The spread of farming in Central Europe and its impact on Mesolithic society, 6000-4400 BC	178
21	A Mesolithic Legacy: The Neolithic in southern Europe, 6000-4000 BC; debates in historical linguistics and genetics	187
22	A Scottish Envoi: Colonisation, Mesolithic lifestyles and the transition to the Neolithic in western Scotland, 20,000-4300 BC	196
	The Americas
23	Searching for the First Americans: The discovery of ice-age settlement, AD 1927-1994	210
24	American Past in the Present: Dental, linguistic, genetic and skeletal evidence for the peopling of the Americas	221
25	On the Banks of Chinchihuapi: Excavation and interpretation of Monte Verde, AD 1977-1997, 12,500 BC	229
26	Explorers in a Restless Landscape: North American fauna, landscape evolution and human colonisation, 20,000-11,500 BC	236
27	Clovis Hunters on Trial: Extinction of the mega-fauna and Clovis lifestyles, 11,500-10,000 BC	246
28	Virginity Reconsidered: Hunter-gatherers of Tierra del Fuego and in the Amazon, 11,500-6000 BC	258
29	Herders and the 'Christ-Child': Animal and plant domestication in the Andes, and coastal foragers, 10,500-5000 BC	266
30	A Double-Take in the Oaxaca Valley: The domestication of maize, squash and beans in Mexico, 10,500-5000 BC	274
31	To Koster: Hunter-gatherer lifestyles in North America, 7000-5000 BC	286
32	Salmon Fishing and the Gift of History: Complex hunter-gatherers of the northwest coast, 6000-5000 BC	296
	Greater Australia and East Asia
33	A Lost World Revealed: Tasmanian hunter-gatherers, 20,000-6000 BC	304
34	Body Sculpture at Know Swamp: Burial and society in Southeast Australia, 14,000-6000 BC, and mega-faunal extinctions	312
35	Across the Arid Zone: Hunter-gatherer adaptations to the Central Australian Desert, 30,000 BC-AD 1966	319
36	Fighting Men and a Serpent's Birth: Art, society and ideology in northern Australia, 13,000-6000 BC	327
37	Pigs and Gardens in the Highlands: The development of tropical horticulture in highland New Guinea, 20,000-5000 BC	337
38	Lonesome in Sundaland: Hunter-gatherers in the Southeast Asian tropical rainforests, 20,000-5000 BC	348
39	Down the Yangtze: The origin of rice farming, 11,500-6500 BC	359
40	With the Jomon: Complex hunter-gatherers in Japan and the earliest pottery, 14,500-6000 BC	370
41	Summer in the Arctic: The mammoth steppe and colonisation of the High Arctic, 19,000-6500 BC	381
	South Asia
42	A Passage through India: Indian rock art and villages on the Ganges Plain, 20,000-8500 BC	396
43	A Long Walk across the Hindu Kush: Early farming in South and Central Asia; the domestication of cotton, 7500-5000 BC	407
44	Vultures of the Zagros: The roots of Mesopotamian civilisation, 11,000-9000 BC	420
45	Approaching Civilisation in Mesopotamia: The development of towns and trade, 8500-6000 BC	430
	Africa
46	Baked Fish by the Nile: Hunter-gatherers of North Africa and the Nile valley, 20,000-11,000 BC	443
47	On Lukenya Hill: The development of East African landscapes and faunas after 20,000 BC	453
48	Frogs' Legs and Ostrich Eggs: Hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, 12,500 BC	462
49	A South African Tour: Changing environments, diet and social life, 12,500-7000 BC	469
50	Thunderbolts in the Tropics: Hunter-gatherers in Central and West Africa; environmental change in East Africa, 7000-5000 BC	483
51	Sheep and Cattle in the Sahara: The development of pastoralism in North Africa, 9500-5000 BC	490
52	Farmers in the Nile Valley and Beyond: The arrival of cereal agriculture in North Africa, 5500-4000 BC	499
	Epilogue: 'The Blessings of Civilisation': Past, present and future impacts of global warming on human history	504
	Notes	513
	Bibliography	575
	Picture Acknowledgements	611
	Index	613

Editorial Reviews

This massive and clever book opens modern scholarship about the distant past to nonspecialists. Buyers of this book will get their money’s worth. It comes with a generous supply of maps and pictures of artifacts and digs, some of which are in color… Erudite and also quirky, Mithen summarizes the work of contemporary archaeologists, often by recounting his own visits to archaeological sites and drawing on insights from recent research on paleoclimates and human genetics… This impressive book stands out as the new standard work.

The Historian - David M. Fahey

After the Ice offers a fascinating whirlwind tour of an underappreciated segment of human history… The prose is lively and evocative as Mithen unfolds a compelling story… The cumulative effect of this book should be a profound new appreciation of a largely unknown and crucially important period of our past. If you want to find out what you don’t know about the grand sweep of human history, there is not a better place to start.

Douglas K. Charlesn Scientist

The resulting floods, spread of forests and retreat of the deserts set up the planet we know today. Mithen’s exhaustive explanation of how human beings began living in small, mobile groups and then permanent villages and the resultant creation of civilisation is a big tale that’s worth staying with.

The Herald [Glasgow, Scotland, UK] - Brian Hennigan

By the end of this rich and multilayered book, I was dazzled and hungry for more. Mithen has succeeded where other archaeologists have failed: He transports the reader back into the past, showing evocatively how humans adapted to 15,000 years worth of environmental change.

Discover - Nina Jablonski

The author successfully achieved his goal of presenting a great deal of information about a pivotal point in our history in a thorough and easily digestible manner… This successful compilation of human history from 20,000–5,000 BC should not be overlooked as a key reference and welcome addition to any library of an interested novice, undergraduate student of prehistory, or seasoned archaeologist looking for a well written synthesis.

Paleoanthropology - John D. Rissetto

With the help of a fictional guide dubbed John Lubbock, modeled after a Victorian naturalist who wrote a popular book called Prehistoric Times, Mithen embarks on a vivid tour of the warming world as it emerged from the last ice age. In the process, he lends a you-are-there immediacy to an era in which humans invented farming, settled in towns, and created civilization as we know it.

Discover

Using an unorthodox narrative device, Mithen explores why, how, and where farming displaced hunting and gathering. Mithen conjures John Lubbock, an English author of a once-popular 1865 history of the Stone Age, and sends him back in time to visit dozens of excavation sites around the world as they appeared when inhabited. Lubbock’s transcontinental perambulations permit Mithen (a practicing archaeologist who describes his digs in Scotland) to underscore one causal factor in the agricultural revolution: the fluctuations of climate at the end of the last Ice Age. Weather, sea level, and zones of plant and animal life changed dramatically in the 15,000 years of Lubbock’s walkabout, and Mithen explains how environmental volatility is scientifically known as he sketches Lubbock observing the various ‘living’ human communities that have been uncovered. A successful marriage of fact and imagination.

Booklist - Gilbert Taylor

In an ambitious undertaking, archaeologist Mithen describes 15,000 years of ancient history from 20,000 to 5,000 B.C.… Mithen explores how studying the abrupt transition between the ice age and a period of global warming could provide clues to the effects of climate changes going on today.

Science News

Mithen did a huge amount of research to produce this curiously encyclopedic work. The book is empirically authoritative but quirkily postmodern… [A] truly provocative and ambitious work… After the Ice is a book that should be read and then exasperatingly argued about… And it does evoke the real excitement of doing Stone Age archaeology (from the digging to the debating the meaning of the finds): the passion to learn that has driven so many prehistorians and dreamers.

Science - Lawrence Guy Straus

After the Ice offers a fascinating whirlwind tour of an underappreciated segment of human history...The prose is lively and evocative as Mithen unfolds a compelling story...The cumulative effect of this book should be a profound new appreciation of a largely unknown and crucially important period of our past. If you want to find out what you don't know about the grand sweep of human history, there is not a better place to start.

American Scientist - Douglas K. Charles

The author successfully achieved his goal of presenting a great deal of information about a pivotal point in our history in a thorough and easily digestible manner...This successful compilation of human history from 20,000-5,000 BC should not be overlooked as a key reference and welcome addition to any library of an interested novice, undergraduate student of prehistory, or seasoned archaeologist looking for a well written synthesis.
— John D. Rissetto

Paleoanthropology

The resulting floods, spread of forests and retreat of the deserts set up the planet we know today. Mithen's exhaustive explanation of how human beings began living in small, mobile groups and then permanent villages and the resultant creation of civilisation is a big tale that's worth staying with.
— Brian Hennigan

Glasgow Herald

After the Ice offers a fascinating whirlwind tour of an underappreciated segment of human history...The prose is lively and evocative as Mithen unfolds a compelling story...The cumulative effect of this book should be a profound new appreciation of a largely unknown and crucially important period of our past. If you want to find out what you don't know about the grand sweep of human history, there is not a better place to start.
— Douglas K. Charles

American Scientist

This massive and clever book opens modern scholarship about the distant past to nonspecialists. Buyers of this book will get their money's worth. It comes with a generous supply of maps and pictures of artifacts and digs, some of which are in color...Erudite and also quirky, Mithen summarizes the work of contemporary archaeologists, often by recounting his own visits to archaeological sites and drawing on insights from recent research on paleoclimates and human genetics...This impressive book stands out as the new standard work.
— David M. Fahey

The Historian

Using an unorthodox narrative device, Mithen explores why, how, and where farming displaced hunting and gathering. Mithen conjures John Lubbock, an English author of a once-popular 1865 history of the Stone Age, and sends him back in time to visit dozens of excavation sites around the world as they appeared when inhabited. Lubbock's transcontinental perambulations permit Mithen (a practicing archaeologist who describes his digs in Scotland) to underscore one causal factor in the agricultural revolution: the fluctuations of climate at the end of the last Ice Age. Weather, sea level, and zones of plant and animal life changed dramatically in the 15,000 years of Lubbock's walkabout, and Mithen explains how environmental volatility is scientifically known as he sketches Lubbock observing the various 'living' human communities that have been uncovered. A successful marriage of fact and imagination.
— Gilbert Taylor

Booklist

Mithen did a huge amount of research to produce this curiously encyclopedic work. The book is empirically authoritative but quirkily postmodern...[A] truly provocative and ambitious work...After the Ice is a book that should be read and then exasperatingly argued about...And it does evoke the real excitement of doing Stone Age archaeology (from the digging to the debating the meaning of the finds): the passion to learn that has driven so many prehistorians and dreamers.
— Lawrence Guy Straus

Science

The resulting floods, spread of forests and retreat of the deserts set up the planet we know today. Mithen's exhaustive explanation of how human beings began living in small, mobile groups and then permanent villages and the resultant creation of civilisation is a big tale that's worth staying with.

Glasgow Herald - Brian Hennigan