Archaeologists tend to reserve the term ‘civilisation’ for the settled villages and towns of the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Many of the innovations that we think are characteristic of human civilisation were, however, the inventions of Ice Age hunter-gatherers. Just think of eyed-needles and tailored clothing, drawing, painting and sculpture, jewellery, living structures, and the burial of the dead; all part of Ice Age life, and innovations of small, highly mobile groups of hunter-gatherers who patchily occupied the steppe tundras of Eurasia from the time of their first dispersals up into northern latitudes between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago.
These and many more Ice Age innovations are brought strikingly to life in Clifford and Bahn’s excellent introduction to Ice Age life. Production quality is superb: Archaeopress have done justice to a highly readable text by producing a lavishly illustrated and colourful book, which should have a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in studying the Palaeolithic, either out of general interest or for university-level study. Despite the broad title, its focus is the European Upper Palaeolithic: the archaeological record of its earliest Homo sapiens inhabitants, some 1,200 generations of women and men between around 40,000 years ago and the end of the Ice Age a little after 12,000 years ago. As the authors hope, the book does fill a gap: as they observe, a number of popular science books on Neanderthals exist, but until now ones on our own species have been very rare.
The story begins with our ancestors’ biology; from growth, wear-and-tear, and health ‘from womb to tomb’, to Clifford’s close interest in gender roles, pregnancy, and childhood, which are of particular use given modern concerns with equality and diversity. After having set the biology up, the book sets up the wider background of Ice Age climate and environments, and the campsites that provided shelter in them. Following that, the thematic arrangement treats tools and crafts, subsistence and survival, and social life, fleshing out a comprehensive treatment of the archaeological data with pertinent examples from ethnography (social lives) and animal behaviour (how to hunt), but retains a blessedly cautious approach throughout, avoiding over-interpretation and sensationalism. I always enjoy reading Bahn’s critiques of the way that it became popular in the 1990s to interpret cave art as deriving from altered states of consciousness in shamanic activity, or ‘shamania’ as he refers to it, and it takes another deserved pummelling here.
