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]
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