Skip to main content

After the Ice: A global human history 20,000 to 5,000 BC – Steven Mithen ****

If the sole determining quality of a book was scope, this would come top of the charts – it attempts to take in the whole world between the end of the ice age and the neolithic. It’s a noble attempt and in many ways very successful. (That sounds like a sentence that is going to be followed by a “but” – and there is a “but” later on, but let’s concentrate on what’s in it and why it’s good first.)
First, though, we do need to ask “why is this book here (on the Popular Science site) at all?” It is an archaeological history, and though archaeology is a scientific discipline, it is not normally classified as science – in fact the publisher’s classification on the back of the book describes it as history. Yet it has a lot to say about the origins of modern man, and as such we can probably classify it under our “human science” biological categorization – I can only assume that’s why it got listed for the Aventis Prize. If it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have appeared here, which would have been a shame because it’s a book that will stay with me for a long time.
The cunning trick Steven Mithen uses to take us into the post ice-age world, is to put a virtual observer, John Lubbock (named after a Victorian writer on the subject), who experiences first hand what is going on at prehistoric sites at the time they were occupied. Then Mithen pulls back from Lubbock’s “experience” and tells us about the actual finds that it is based on. This works marvellously well, rather like a reconstructional TV documentary like Walking with Dinosaurs, without anywhere as much of the guesswork presented as fact in those shows. Occasionally Mithen varies the technique, at one point bringing Lubbock forward to the 1970s to witness a particular discovery being made.
The only problem with this approach is that Lubbock’s nature varies. He appears to be human and corporeal – he eats – and he takes part in helping the people of the period, yet it said elsewhere that he can’t be seen. Despite his apparent humanity, at one point he stands in one place for 1,000 years. Now Mithen might argue it doesn’t matter what Lubbock does, it’s a fictional concept. Lubbock travels backwards and forwards in time, for goodness sake. But once you give flesh to a character like this, the reader has every right to expect some consistency, and to be thrown by the opposite. Perhaps Lubbock should have been a robot, like Marvin in Hitchiker’s Guide, who at one point stays in the same place for millions of years.
The other problem with the book as a whole is that it’s so long! There are 511 pages in smallish print before reaching the notes. Just occasionally you feel, like Lubbock, that you seem to have been in there for a thousand years. Especially as, after a while, it all gets rather the same. And sometimes you want to know what happened after. It might not have done what Mithen inteded, but it would have made a more readable book if he had concentrated on two or three areas, and followed through all of prehistory, stopping at the point recorded history was available for that area.
The length doesn’t stop it being a magnificent work, though – and that it certainly is.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you  
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

The Naked Sun (SF) - Isaac Asimov ****

In my read through of all six of Isaac Asimov's robot books, I'm on the fourth, from 1956 - the second novel featuring New York detective Elijah Baley. Again I'm struck by how much better his book writing is than that in the early robot stories. Here, Baley, who has spent his life in the confines of the walled-in city is sent to the Spacer planet of Solaria to deal with a murder, on a mission with political overtones. Asimov gives us a really interesting alternative future society where a whole planet is divided between just 20,000 people, living in vast palace-like structures, supported by hundreds of robots each.  The only in-person contact between them is with a spouse (and only to get the distasteful matter of children out of the way) or a doctor. Otherwise all contact is by remote viewing. This society is nicely thought through - while in practice it's hard to imagine humans getting to the stage of finding personal contact with others disgusting, it's an intere

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur