Global Human History After the Ice Age

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* Book: After the Ice. A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC. Steven Mithen. Harvard University Press, 2006.

URL = https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674019997

Linking geo-climactic changes to the evolution of human culture and forms of consciousness.


Description

1. From the publisher:

"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."


2.

"After the Ice is an encyclopedic volume of more than six hundred large-format pages, covering fifteen thousand years of the human presence on every continent except Antarctica. The thrust of the narrative, a few caveats by the author notwithstanding, is that the global warming which prompted the waning of the last Ice Age also prompted humans to cross a social Rubicon from a timeless prehistory where “little of significance happened” and people lived “just as their ancestors had been doing for millions of years” (p. 3) into the modern world of historicity, agriculture, towns, and civilization. This book, by a prominent prehistorian, has a number of aims to which many environmental historians will find themselves sympathetic, specifically the attempt to digest and popularize a field for a general audience, and the desire to convince the readership that prime environmental lessons for today may be drawn from the study of the past. In Mithen’s case, his most important historical conclusion seems to be that climate change, and global warming in particular, was the instigator and foundation of human society as we know it; the most important corollary lesson is that the looming change in the planet’s temperature will in all likelihood have consequences we cannot dream of. Other reflections revolve around the relative worth of civilization and its benefits on the one hand, and, on the other, the social conflicts and environmental degradation which Mithen sees as intrinsic to any group of humans of more than a couple of hundred souls."

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237962529_After_The_Ice_A_Global_Human_History_20000-5000_BC_By_Steven_Mithen) [accessed Aug 15 2022].


Review

2. Review by Martin P. Evison:

"Mithen develops his central thesis from Leda Cosmides & John Tooby's model of the mind likening it to a Swiss army knife (discussed in Barkow et al 'The Adapted Mind', (1992)), consisting of a collection of independent task-orientated modules, but goes further in insisting both on a degree of 'generalised intelligence', which he sees as understated in Cosmides & Tooby's argument and on some leakage -- in Mithen's terms 'cognitive fluidity' -- occurring between these domains. The mind's evolutionary history, he suggests, is a three-stage process: a generalised intelligence in primates and early hominids, a modular intelligence evolving to its ultimate in archaic Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and a 'cognitively fluid' mentality arising not with anatomically modern humans, but with the 'big bang' of human culture at 60,000 to 30,000 years ago. Mithen builds on Fodor's The Modularity of Mind (1983), Gardner's Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983), and Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby's The Adapted Mind (1992) to support the modular component of his model. Dan Sperber's (1994) concept of 'meta-representation', as well as Margaret Boden's (1990) and Arthur Koestler's (1975) ideas of 'transformation' or 'interlocking' of conceptual spaces are used to support the idea of communication between these task-orientated domains. He uses the notion of 'ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny' to support his evolutionary arguments with models from child development, such as Annette Karmiloff-Smith's Beyond Modularity (1992), in which a component of generalised intelligence is also claimed for young children. Mithen marshals support for his developing argument well, but so well that one is left struggling to recognise a novel hypothesis. The cognitive models are pre-existing, and the idea that creativity is due to analogy and metaphor, themselves permitted by communication across cognitive domains, is evident in Boden and Koestler's work. Crucially , Mithen's central use of the idea that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' to map cognitive development from life history to evolutionary history, as proposed earlier by Thomas Wynn (cited Mithen p. 62), is problematic. This is a complex enough issue in biology and an analogy which Mithen wishes to apply only hesitantly to the analysis of cognitive evolution. Mithen states: "I have no theoretical conviction that recapitulation of the evolution of the mind during development necessarily occurs" (p.63).

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276025904_Review_of_The_Prehistory_of_the_Mind_by_Steven_Mithen) [accessed Aug 15 2022].


2. John Sarnecki:

"Whether we ultimately accept Mithen’s depiction of our cognitive evolution (and I argue elsewhere (see Sarnecki & Sponheimer 2002) that we should we not), his use of material culture as a constraint on psychological theorizing is compelling. Any explanation of how the mind works must be compatible with the developmental facts of our evolution. Thus, we need to be sensitive to how the structure and capacities of the mind came about. This little recognized control on our theorizing has become more widely acknowledged since the publication of Mithen’s book, but most cognitive scientists still know little about the archaeological evidence that underlies modern anthropological interpretations of human behaviour. If Mithen’s earlier emphasis was on the point where everything changed, then his new work concentrates entirely on human development in the years substantially downstream rom this high watermark.

Afer the Ice focuses on the archaeology of between 20,000 and 5,000 years ago, a period characterized not by any profound changes in human cognition, but rather by the retreating ice of the last glacial maximum. If this time frame doesn’t capture the crucial period where Mithen dates the modernization of the human mind, it does best to witness its blossoming. In this period we find the development of pottery, the domestication of both plants and animals, the burgeoning of new cultural practices involving status, ritual and religion, and the subsequent development of village and urban life. By the end of this period, Mithen notes, “the foundations of the modern world had been laid down and nothing that came after – classical Greece, the Industrial Revolution, the atomic age, the Internet – has ever matched the significance of those events”.

After the Ice is meant to be a popular book for a general, if well-motivated, audience, but it succeeds on many levels that should be of interest to the specialist as well. It is an impressively detailed and comprehensive work, offering an account of the physical impressions and material cultures of post ice-age humanity on virtually every continent".

(https://www.academia.edu/3533303/After_the_Ice_A_Global_History_20_000_5000_BC)


More information

A book with a similar theme and coverage: