Global Human History After the Ice Age

* 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].