https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2021/07/2021080-after-ice-global-human-history.ht... ( )

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 city 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 In that sense, this book is slightly outdated.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 so clumsily done 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/1153151722 ( )

I picked up this book in the hopes of learning about what mischief humans got up to on all the continents after the ice age (20 000 BC) until the event of civilization (5000 BC) via archaeological, genetic and linguistic evidence. Well, this book just didn't do it for me. I read approximately half the book and had to stop. Instead of a science/history book, the author wrote an annoying historical fiction novel with the odd bit of archaeological findings thrown in.

The author has a habit of describing what he thinks life might be like at various places at various points in history, but he isn't always clear to differentiate between the information based on archaeological evidence and what is essentially the author's speculation. In addition, the presence of an extremely annoying, silly and distracting fictional, time-travelling anthropologist ghost gimmick acting as eye-witness is included everywhere. This fictional character was amusing int he first two chapters, but after that I kept hoping some neolithic shaman would exorcise him.

This annoying fictional character wonders around the prehistoric world in no particular order, other than dealing with each continent at a time. This random wondering in time and space makes for jumbled and confusing reading, especially since no additional timeline diagram was provided. In addition, many of the sites discussed in the book have similar findings and everything eventually blurres into one big smudge. Pictures or diagrams would have been useful to differentiate these sites from one another.

In between the historical fiction accounts are jumbled-up, brief and rather vague archeological descriptions of selected sites, but genetic and linguistic evidence is mostly ignored, or currently outdated (the book was published in 2004).

What facts I managed to pick out of what I read of this book were interesting, but the writing style was confusing, messy and after a while, rather boring. I just couldn't keep my interest in this book going any further and decided to find something else to read. ( )

A fantastic journey into the past. I felt as though I was hiding in the grassy fields of ancient Europe, looking over the wild steppes, and even feeling the pain of making my own Flint tools with unskilled hands. Truly marvellous. ( )

People are first amazed, then terrified as rising sea level caused by global warming – 7° C in 50 years - overwhelms coastal plains, turning lowlands to scattered islands, then drowning those islands. Entire ecosystems disappear or are modified beyond recognition. Savannas change to desert, alpine valleys are covered by forests, and most of the world’s megafauna go extinct – 36 large mammal species in North America, 46 in South America, 15 in Australia, 7 in Europe, 2 in Africa. Familiar plants and animals disappear along with their habitats. It is an ecological catastrophe beyond the imagination of the people who witnessed it. Which were not very many, because we’re talking about the end of the Younger Dryas period, around 9600 BCE.


Despite that little bit of sensationalism, I have mixed feelings about After the Ice. The bad parts first:


*Author Steven Mithen adopts an annoying narrative device – that of a young modern man, John Lubbock, who is able to travel in time and wander invisibly around the various peoples of the Mesolithic and Neolithic. This starts out only slightly cute and becomes increasingly tedious. The wanderings of Lubbock add considerable useless bulk to an already thick book. Perhaps some readers will find this useful; not me.


*Nothing is tied together chronologically; instead the book is organized geographically – Western Asia to Europe to the Americas to Australia to South Asia to Africa, and even within a region Lubbock does not travel in time order, repeatedly bouncing from 20000 BCE to 6000 BCE and back as he enters different areas. If there was a chart somewhere that related the different sites – showing that the Middle Eastern Natufian culture was contemporary with the Ahrensburg site in Schleswig-Holstein, the Monte Verde site in southern Chile, the earliest Jomon of Japan and the Eland Cave site in South Africa (for example) – it would be better, but instead you have to depend on your memory and “John Lubbock”’s interior monologs.


*Mithen swallows the Environmental Litany hook, line, and sinker. Despite repeatedly pointing out in the text that the climate change from the last glacial maximum through the late glacial interstadial through the return of the ice during the Younger Dryas and the sudden end of that period was vastly greater than the worst imaginings of Al Gore, his final chapter is full of the usual stuff about carbon footprint and genetically modified food and overpopulation.


Mithen is careless and poor at explaining information from other fields. He repeatedly talks about “changes in the Earth’s orbit” – Milankovitch cycles – as if these were some sort of sudden and unpredictable event. In fact, these aren’t “changes in the Earth’s orbit” at all; they’re just as much a part of the Earth’s orbit as the annual revolution around the Sun, they just happen at a time scale outside human experience.


Now the good parts:


*The book covers a time period that tends to be ignored by popular works. There are lots of book on the origins of our genus in East Africa, and lots on the dawn of civilization in the Near East, but not much on what happened in between.


Along the same lines, Mithen shows that a lot of “perceived knowledge” about this period is just plain wrong. For years, the conventional wisdom was a gradual transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture to settled farming community to animal domestication to pottery to metal working to Reality TV. Mithen shows that there were lots of places where hunter-gatherers lived in settled communities, where pottery preceded farming, where people abandoned early agriculture to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and so on. This is one of the advantages of the global scope of the book; archaeology has tended to focus on events in the Middle East and Europe. Farming is hard work, and people won't do it it if they don't have to. It was always a puzzle to European settlers in North America why the natives didn't immediately adopt European-style farming as soon as they saw it; the answer apparently is they didn't see much point in it. Our own view of what the transition to farming is "supposed" to look like is probably heavily colored by the way things went in "hydraulic" civilizations like Mesopotamia, Egypt, and early China. Lots of other cultures developed farming independently and in most cases it seems to have gone more like the transitional hunter-gatherer-gardener pattern than the extensive irrigation agriculture pattern. I wonder if a lot of academic preconceptions are influenced by the Marxist idea of historical inevitability? Marx was pretty convinced that the hydraulic civilization stage was a necessary part of his historic pattern.


The book is full of fascinating little tidbits of knowledge (just as an example, did you know that there was a Neolithic hunter-gatherer people in northern Siberia whose principal game animal was the polar bear?)


Mithen is willing to speculate about various controversies – was the late Pleistocene megafauna extinction in North America due to overhunting by the Clovis culture or to climate change or both – but is careful to distinguish speculation from what’s actually known. He especially and laudably distances himself from the archaeological tradition of explaining anything that isn’t understood as “ritual artifacts” or “ritual behavior” or “ritual structures”.


There are excellent maps, showing the extent of ice and the coastline at the last glacial maximum. There’s also a fine chart of oxygen isotope data from the LGM to the present, showing (although Mithen doesn’t draw attention to either) that the planet has been cooling since the temperature high at the end of the Younger Dryas, and that such controversial events as the Medieval Climate Optimum and the Little Ice Age are not even recognizable blips in the long term pattern (in terms of oxygen-18 data, the change at the transition from the last interstadial to the Younger Dryas was about nine time as much as the difference between the MCO and the LIA. Of course, this is only a proxy for global temperature, but till pretty interesting.)


So I suppose I’ll have to give this one three stars, with the understanding that parts of the book deserve five and parts one. ( )