Prehistory: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions #096

by Chris Gosden

Prehistory covers the period of some 4 million years before the start of written history, when our earliest ancestors, the Australopithecines, existed in Africa. But this is relatively recent compared to whole history of the earth of some 4.5 billion years. A key aspect of prehistory is that it provides a sense of scale, throwing recent ways of life into perspective. Humans and their ancestors lived in many different ways and the cultural variety we see now is just atiny fraction of that which has existed over millions of years. Humans are part of the broader evolution of landscapes and communities of plants and animals, but Homo sapiens is also the only species to have made a real impact on planetary systems. To understand such an impact, we need a grasp ofour longest term development and ways of life.In this new edition of his Very Short Introduction, Chris Gosden invites us to think seriously about who we are by considering who we have been. As he explains, many new discoveries have been made in archaeology over the last ten years, and a new framework for prehistory is emerging. A greater understanding of Chinese and central Asian prehistory has thrown Eurasian prehistory in quite a different light, with flows of the influence of culture over large areas now evident. This haseaten away at the traditional view of human progress around the invention of agriculture, the development of cities and (much later) the industrial revolution, and given us new geographies to think about. Chris Gosden explores the new landscape of our prehistory, and considers the way the different geographicallocations weave together.ABOUT THE The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Prehistory, Archaeology, Science, Anthropology, Ancient History

152 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Chris Gosden is a Professorial Fellow in European Archaeology at the University of Oxford. He teaches students in the Archaeology and Anthropology degree. He is also an author of several books on human links with the material world, the long term history of creativity, intelligence, the emotions, and aesthetics; the archaeology of colonisation in the recent past, as well as in older periods such as the setting up of the Roman empire;late Prehistoric periods in Europe from the late Bronze Age to AD 400. Celtic art and other aspects of material culture;issues of identity, especially what it means to be English;the history of museums, their collections, archaeology and anthropology as disciplines.

Reviews

[Bojan Tunguz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've read some 30+ Very Short Introductions series books so far, and by and large they are very good and informative readings. Most of them I would give either 4 or 5 stars. However, the "Prehistory" book is far worse than any of them, both in terms of content and style. In fact, I think it is so bad that I was compelled to write my very first Amazon review to warn others about it. The writing is rambling, vacuous and repetitive. There is very little prehistory covered, or any other history for that matter. You'll probably learn more about David Beckham's soccer skills than, say, what happened to the Neanderthals (they went extinct). However, if you enjoy the pseudo-intellectual cross-cultural, deconstructionist academese babble, this book just might be the one to keep you up late at night. Otherwise, stay away as far as possible.

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

For what it advertised, this book has fulfilled its purpose. It does indeed deliver a "very short" introduction to prehistory, touching upon the defining periods of this age, mass migrations, development of culture in its oral form and concerns itself with the identities of cultures, as they appeared in their most primitive forms.

Highly recommended for people who want to develop a basis of knowledge on the subject, but are unsure where to start. This right here offers you enough information to awake interest and fuel future research.

[Callum · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you want to know facts, figures, interesting stories and the state-of-the-art in theories in where, how and why we came to be, this book will leave you wanting.

Instead it 'treats' you to an experts' inside view and his perceptions on the subject of prehistory. Whilst i don't doubt his credibility as a prehistorian, he regrettably shares little of his wisdom and no doubt interesting knowledge, instead preferring to ramble on in a repetitive spiel about his particular feelings about objects and how grand they are.

Pretty early on one accepts that this book is unlikely to be a handy compendium of prehistoric knowledge, so one settles for an exploration into how the subject has come about and why it is important. However,
a balanced, objective account of the subject area this is not. Unfortunately, it is weighed down by the authors own opinions and feels poorly structured, at times rambling and often repetitive.

It wasn't short enough.

[Dan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Should have been called "A Very Short Introduction to Critical Theory about Anthropology about Prehistory". The ratio of Marxist material culture critique and post-colonial redefinitions of gender to actual discussions of prehistorical culture was not what I wanted.

[James Hartley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love this series.
This was a decent enough overview but suffers a bit from being written at a time when there´s no real academic consensus on the period. We´re starting to know too much for the old theories and the new theories are just that, theories.
Fine, if you take it as a long magazine article.
Keep your eyes on the news...

[essie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was a decent summary of the current interpretations of prehistory with some interesting critique. I especially enjoyed the info surrounding Gobekli Tepe, burials throughout the prehistoric world and how our present world has been shaped by decisions made by our ancestors thousands of years ago.

I think I would've liked to hear more about the beginning of human history in a more chronological order as a lot of the ideas assume the reader is already aware of certain aspects of the subject. All in all, it's a great jumping off point to understand more about prehistory.

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

The feature I most dislike about the book is how much of it is devoted to sociological meditations, which for another reader might be its great virtue. But I am much more interested in getting down to a more factual kind of understanding, one that organizes facts and dates--even if roughly so--into a kind of narrative. Of course I am not asking for a history as "one damned thing after another" but this book seems to hit the other extreme, of just reflecting on Westerns reflecting on history. I would have much rather had the kind of exposition that I'm finding now in Robert's *History of the World*, wherein we stick much closer to the evidence and interpretation of that evidence, with occasional and swift moments of conversation about the practice of studying history, the extent to which older belief systems were valid, and so on.

Another related reason it was not my favorite is that it uses the language and beliefs of post-modernism that I find, well, wrong and not as helpful as I think such post-moderns think they are. I don't find it helpful to analyze the Hawaiian belief systems and the European ones as just as internally consistent but in conflict. Rather I see it as: They had a set of myths, I understand why they held those myths, I understand that all societies have myths and the Europeans were no exception; but myths are ultimately false and so long as our goal is to understand reality we're better off the extent to which we divest ourselves of myths.

So in general I lament that so much understanding of the flow of events was sacrificed to mushy post-modernism that at best didn't teach me the things I set out to know, and at worst wasn't really true. What we do know about this period is pretty thin and fragmentary, but it certainly could have filled a book this size better than Gosden has written it.

[PolicemanPrawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is way too much of the pretentious postmodernist, deconstructionist, pseudo-intellectual, IYI approach in this book for it to be worth much. There is just too little actual history, even history that may be somewhat speculative given how far back it was. The structure and writing is also somewhat poor. Too many of these Very Short Introductions take liberties with the author giving his very personal approach on the subject. In some cases, it works, but in many instances, it doesn't; whereas you cannot go wrong with a more objective and systematic approach to the subject.

[Daniel Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chapter 1: Rethinking prehistory
Chapter 2: The history of prehistory
Chapter 3: In the beginning—African origins and global movements
Chapter 4: The long-term history of Europe and Asia
Chapter 5: Continental fusion—connections across Europe, Asia, and Africa
Chapter 6: New Worlds—the Americas, Australis, and the Pacific
Chapter 7: Final thoughts

[Jaime T · Rating 1 out of 5]

ANT100. This book is written very blandly so that it gets boring in every paragraph even though what Gosden is trying to say may be interesting.

Gosden argues that common views of human history (like ones shown in the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari) may be wrong. To see human history with a view of progress where we went from primitive people and just got better and better to where we are today may be false.

Gosden finds evidence from many archaeological sites across the world to show that hunter gatherers were never what we thought they were. Evidence shows that some hunter gatherers may have settled down in small areas and practiced agriculture, contrary to popular 'progress' belief that agriculture only came after hunter gatherers in history.

The term 'hunter gatherer' is not a good term because it suggests more primitive people who only hunted and foraged, even though evidence shows that they also practiced more sedentary lifestyles with growing crops and building small villages.

Things like tools, agriculture, art, religion, and domestication of plants and animals can be examined within many sites on all continents to find that humans have had a bit more of a complex history that is not linear. Humans dip their toes into agriculture then go partially back into more 'primitive' life styles that favor more mobile living then they return to settling down and making pottery. Humans in different places at the same time could also be doing drastically different things - one could be more nomadic while the other may be in their own settlement.

[Cinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The lack of focus is complimented by his jumbled prose. In a very short introduction, I would have appreciated more discussion of facts and less pushing of his own thesis.

[Brice Karickhoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Point number one: Michael Dickerson would HATE this book

Point number two: I didn’t love it for mostly different reasons.

This book basically attempts to cover the period from when apes started walking upright until writing developed in each region of the world.

To me, there were a couple major drawbacks.

First, the author discussed his views on history as a discipline as much as history itself. Not only were his personal musings far less entertaining, but I also found them largely disagreeable. He basically argues that we have mistakenly understood the arc of history as a story of man’s increased control of the environment and invention of technology so that we could meet our basic needs. He argues that history is less linear, less pragmatic, and we could only see it as such an arc of progress because of our Eurocentric logic-based minds. 

He has a little bit of a point, but as far as I can tell, he has swung the pendulum so incredibly far in the other direction that his view of history seems largely detached from reality. But then again, maybe I am just blinded by my perspective. He’d think so…. I always wonder what it would be like to be as enlightened as some of the most self-assured authors I read.

Second, because the book needed to be short and a decent chunk of its page count was devoted to the above ideas, it sprinted through some content that has the potential to be incredibly interesting if written well. I remember reading the first quarter of Guns, Germs, and Steel (which was mostly about pre-history) and just being gripped! I basically read this book in hopes that it would recapture some of that experience, and it did not. Oh well!

[Lee Broderick · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the Very Short Introductions that manages to defy the limits of the space allotted, covering a vast subject with great enthusiasm and (hopefully) inspiring further research.

[Michael Huang · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the most clearly written narrative. A lot of things (such as genera name and geological time name) could be explained. With a bit of search and reorganization, here is a rough story extracted from the reading.

Prehistory as a subject is only beginning to take shape after the theory of evolution gained ground. Broadly speaking, human prehistory spans only two geological age: Pleistocene (from Greek/Latin for most new: ~2.6 million years ago or “mya” — 11.7kya) and Holocene (wholly new: from 11.7kya to now). Homo started about 2.4mya with Homo habilis (handy man).

Before Homo (7mya -2.4mya):
The direct ancestor traces back to 7mya with a split between apes and humans. By 4.4mya, a genus called Ardipithecus (meaning ground ape, colloquially known as Ardi) started to develop. A near complete skeleton of a 1.2m female has been found. One descendant genus is Australopithecus (southern ape) whose hind legs have given up grasping. The most famous skeleton Lucy belongs to Australopithecus. Around 2.4mya, there is a bifurcation where one branch developed larger teeth and the other larger brains (Homo). Both Homo and Australopithecus belong to the tribe Hominini.

Evolution of Homo:
Lower Paleolithic time (3.3mya-300kya): Stone tools started around 2.6mya. By 2.4mya, many genera and species of hominins existed and perhaps have interacted in ways we can’t imagine. All of this is limited to Africa, until 1.8mya where hominins started to get out of Africa. The first to do so is perhaps homo erectus (upright man). Homo sapien only arose around 300kya, probably in Africa (though there is a multi-regional model that is less supported by evidence), leaving that continent at least 90kya, spreading through Europe and Asia at least by 40kya; into Pacific islands by 35kya; and to America through Siberia by 23kya.

By upper Paleolithic time (40-10kya), there is wide range of artifacts, including stone necklaces found in Sunghir burial in Russia (18kya). It is suspected that by this time, hominins have greater attachment to things and people than any time before and have a greater ability to express those verbally. A very well made lion-man statute was thought to be from 40kya. We now know pottery was invented around 20kya (China) and 14kya (North Africa), though the name of “Pre-Pottery Neolithic” time (PPNA 11.5kya - 10.5kya; PPNB 10.5-8.7kya) persists. Sites in these periods have houses, storage pits, and burials. By PPNB houses started to be rectangular, there were more domesticated plants and animals, and more people lived in a single spot. By 6kya, horses were domesticated in the Russian steppe. The first wheeled vehicles were probably invented by 6kya, first pulled by cattle. Though no silk roads exist this early, piecemeal links facilitated transportation of people and goods. People may have spread into the Mediterranean much earlier, but places like Cyprus, Aegean islands were occupied by 10kya. Domesticated plants and animals presumably with human colonists from Anatolia from 8.5kya reaching Central Europe over the next millennium and Atlantic seaboard 5 centuries after that. Trade, alliance, and fights come with migrations. A burial of 34 individuals (16 children + 18 adults) showed that they may be fleeing when killed. The metal-based times (Bronze Age etc) are confusing as metallurgy arose at different times in different regions. For instance smelted Copper started in Anatolia around 9th millennium BCE and spread to southeast Europe and Middle East by 7th millennium BCE.

The New Model: In general, the old narrative of human prehistory — increasing control of the environment — is a problematic narrative not backed up by evidence. Also, categorization as hunter-gatherer, agriculturalists, and pastoralist is problematic too. Take the domestication of teosinte into maize for example: Domestication started some 9 kya, probably in southern Mexico, with cultivation beginning some 2,000 years later: Village life did not coalesce until around 3,500 years later in places like Mexico, so that much of this plant experiment was by people who were semi-mobile.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

The VSI books are a mixed bag - some are excellent, some are not. For me, this falls into the latter category. What do we mean by the term prehistory? What separates prehistory from history? Is prehistory an absolute or relative term? Whilst it’s possible to deduce answers to some of these questions, you’ll need to do your own work, as the focus here is basically as follows: “our understanding of prehistory is a European imperialist concept that we need to thoroughly reject.” Fine if that’s the subject you wish to read about, but an objective history of “prehistory” this ain’t. Gosden argues (fairly convincingly to be honest) that the traditional view of prehistory has been from the perspective of modern western cities where cultures who have not built skyscrapers and invented tarmac roads are “primitive”. Such a view is obviously subjective and needs rethinking. Fair enough. But Gosden’s writing is also extremely subjective, which for me rather undermines his argument. We even get to hear about some of the digs he’s been lucky enough to have been involved in. Whoopee! The style is rambling and, as Gosden jumps from one continent to another, I got the sense that what we’re getting here is a cherry-picked list of examples that have been selected solely for the purpose of furthering his argument. And again, fair enough if that is the purpose of the work, but that needs to be made explicit from the title. This is not a VSI to prehistory. A particular question for me is the avoidance of a key area of human settlement - the Fertile Crescent, which ran all the way from Egypt to southern Iraq and where cities such as Uruk had populations of many thousands in the fourth century BCE. Gosden mentions Uruk, but only in passing and with no explanation as to what it is. We’re supposed to know. Gosden is obviously dismissive of the hunter-to-farmer-to-citizen narrative that the Fertile Crescent represents, but makes no attempt to either include this key location nor explain why he is not including it. It’s a bit like talking about the history of British pop music whilst ignoring the Beatles. You may not like the Beatles, you might think that their influence is overrated, but their prominence in previous narratives means you cannot just ignore them. As an introduction for the layperson, this book I’m afraid falls a long way short.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is sort of hard for me to process because the author's worldview is pretty different from my own, and that affects a lot of the material in here. The author's view is much more postmodern than my own. They view prehistory as all aspects of human life which are not recorded for posterity, which makes it necessarily hard to talk about in detail. As a result, the author spends relatively little time talking about prehistory itself, and fills a lot more pages with philosophical musings.

Notes:
• Dark ages without literacy are common
○ Is this evidence that writing can reliably be recovered? Or were these dark ages escaped by importing language from somewhere else that had not lost it?
• Early writing was mostly lists and accounting
• Aiello and Dunbar found a relationship between group size and relative brain size, and suggested intelligence comes about mainly to deal with exponentially complicated social networks.
• Author suggests that humans are the only species in the world to use material culture - I disagree. Bower-building birds use material constructions to display power and fitness as a mate.
• "Sunghir Necklace" involves 3,000 beads, clearly cultural and not practical, 18,000 years old
○ Stadel lion man from Sapiens 35-40,0000 years old!
• Human populations from particular geographic regions today show via their mitochondrial DNA that there has been no significant gene influx into their population in the last ~15,000 years. This runs counter to the hypothesis that farming led to a population boom which caused farmers to spread out and overwhelm the low-density hunter-gatherer groups elsewhere.
○ One explanation for this is the most recent ice age - people were driven into refuge regions away from the glaciers, co-mingled within each refuge region, then expanded back out after the ice retreated and kept to themselves after that
• Latitude bands tend to have much more in common than longitude bands, since they have similar climates which allows (at least to some extent) similar plants and animals
• Symbolism clearly requires abstraction, and prehistoric societies were rife with symbolism.
How does Ong's view of language as allowing abstraction reply to that?

[Luca Melchionna · Rating 3 out of 5]

L’autore scrive che la Preistoria va rivista. L’impianto generale che sottendeva tutto quanto abbiamo studiato a scuola, per Gosden, non è più sostenibile alla luce dei ritrovamenti e della decostruzione delle strutture ideologiche che lo tenevano insieme. In particolare, andrebbe abbandonata l’idea che la storia umana abbia una direzione, e che questa sia un progresso lineare verso un sempre maggiore controllo del pianeta da parte di Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Con grande onestà intellettuale, Gosden avverte subito: abbiamo fatto a pezzi una sintesi teorica, ma quella che dovrà sostituirla non è ancora disponibile.

Nel resto del volume, Gosden tenta appunto di dipingere il nuovo, grande affresco teorico che manca. Questo è problematico. Prima di tutto perché tradisce il patto narrativo: il lettore, per definizione, non sa molto di Preistoria: perché questa “very short introduction” dovrebbe essere la sede in cui tentare un’eroica sintesi che non c’è? Noi non possediamo i dettagli del sistema precedente, che sta andando in frantumi, e quindi non possiamo fare confronti. C’è il rischio che si concluda la lettura sapendo molto poco di Preistoria.

E poi, emerge un problema, non nuovo nell’orizzonte dell’epistemologia postmoderna. Se si è fatta piazza pulita del recente passato e si cerca di sostituirlo con un pensiero del tutto nuovo, c’è rischio di rivalutare un po’ troppo il passato non recente, semplicemente perché è l'anello precedente. E infatti puntualmente Gosden sostiene che sia necessario un nuovo apprezzamento del pensiero pre-razionale, che ci dia maggiore consapevolezza delle diversità e della profondità della nostra vicenda. Il fascino di questa proposta è evidente. Se prendiamo sul serio cosmologie, cosmogonie e percorsi sciamanici ci si aprono nuove vie alla comprensione dei rapporti tra uomo e ambiente. La nostra curiosità verso Sapiens si allarga dagli ultimi 500 anni agli ultimi 500mila. Il repertorio di risorse a cui possiamo attingere per mitigare la catastrofe climatica forse si allarga.

E tuttavia, qui oggi, abbiamo davvero bisogno di una maggiore empatia verso il pensiero non razionale? Detta in modo più politico: la cosiddetta Sinistra, abbandonata l’idea di Progresso, davvero si ritiene autorizzata a flirtare con l’ipotesi che la nuova grande Idea sia la Magia?

[Hank Hoeft · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prehistory: A Very Short Introduction, by Chris Gosden, is yet another great short introduction to an academic subject. I especially appreciated Gosden's assertion that the rather chauvinistic traditional 19th century view of humankind's rise as a straight linear maturation from primitive hunter-gatherer to sedentary farmer to city dweller, is simplistic and wrong. Rather, Gosden posits that human prehistory is a mixed stew of many different experiments of all kinds of human cultures. For example, evidence now exists that point to large ancient cities of people who would have been classified previously as classic hunter-gathers. To understand the vast tapestry of human development requires one to take into account both human manipulation of the environment, as well as how the environment influences human development.

I seem to be on a roll with reading Oxford University Press' Very Short Introduction series. When I first discovered this line of books that are a wannabe polymath's dream come true and began reading them, by sheer chance I chose several volumes that in my opinion were marred by left-wing "politically correct" points of view that made me question the validity of the series. But since then, I've not encountered much of that trendy political bias, and for that I am relieved and grateful.

[Masoud · Rating 3 out of 5]

کتاب نسبتا خوبی از مجموعه مختصر مفید انتشارت دانشگاه اکسفورد که به طور خلاصه و با دیدی جدید به تعریف بازه های مختلف این دوره از تاریخ بشر می پردازد. سرفصل های کتاب به طور کلی در مورد مهاجرتهای بزرگ انجام شده در قاره ها، تکامل و توسعه هنر، رقص، موسیقی است که به صورت فرهنگ های شفاهی در طول زمان تکامل یافته است. نکته جالبی که نویسنده به آن اشاره کرده است این است که برخلاف باور عموم که فکر می کنند دوره پیش از تاریخ هزاران سال قبل و با ظهور کشاورزی و شهرنشینی و پیدایش خط به اتمام رسیده است، برای قبایل بومیان گینه نو و برخی بومیان آمازون و غیره این دوره در اویل دهه پنجاه میلادی که اولین تماس آنها با بیرون انجام شد به پایان رسید.

یکی از نقاط ضعف ترجمه که در حین مطالعه کتاب برخوردم این بود که در جدولی که محصولات کشاورزی بومی شده در قاره های مختلف را نشان می داد، ذرت و لوبیا را بومی شده بین النهرین نو��ته بود که با مراجعه به متن اصلی متوجه شدم که مترجم کلمه Mesoamerica را به خاطر شباهت به Mesopotamia بین النهرین ترجمه کرده است. با مقایسه موردی دیگر اشتباه خاصی پیدا نکردم و با صرف نظر کردن از مورد ذکر شده، ترجمه روان و خوبی داشت. برای افراد علاقمند به این موضوع به شدت توصیه می شود.

[Ryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only saving grace of this book was its brevity, but even then I really struggled to finish it. While the first chapter or so went quite well with good summaries of timelines for various parts of the world in terms of human prehistory, defined as the period before writing was invented, the rest of the work went astray. Expecting further elaboration with factual content regarding where and when things happened, what the author gave was instead philosophical and metaphysical musings about human intelligence, mythology etc. that to my mind was offtrack in a book like this. And then he went on in the last part to discuss how the internet and cyberspace can be compared to our prehistorical virtual imaginations and symbolisms. Phew. The worst in the VSI series I've come across. Or it just really went over my head.

[Semih · Rating 2 out of 5]

Diğer "The Very Short Introduction" kitaplarını çok beğenmediğim gibi Tarihöncesi kitabına da yüksek beklentilerle başlamadım ve beklentim boşa çıkmadı. Bu serideki kitaplar neden bu denli sıkıcı oluyor anlamıyorum. Yazar aklına gelenleri sıralamış, çok önemli bahsedilmesi gereken bazı hiçbirşeylerden bahsetmeyip garip bazı şeylerden bahsetmeyi yeğlemiş. Dolayısıyla belki sıkıcı değil ama akıcı olmayan dağınık bir okuma sağladığını söyleyebilirim. Kitap bittiğinde ne öğrendim diye sordum kendme ve kendimi kendi suratıma boş boş bakarken yakaladım. İçinde kıvırdığım çok sayfa da bulunmadığını belirtmeliyim. Sözün özü literatürden haberdar okumak için okuduğum bir kitaptı. Ve taradım. Başka kaynaklara yönelme kararı aldım.

[Felix · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit too winding, even for a short intro: sets out to debunk existing myths about the linearity of prehistory, and is partially successful in that effort, yet seems to get stuck in irrelevant particulars and archaeological terminology that doesn't always build towards a point. Useful lessons on the non-existence of 'progress' but otherwise just a couple hundred pages on obscure discoveries and why they may or may not be correct. Hard to get through, and unfortunately has no reward at the end for the slog.

[Andrés Tutor · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's appalling what Oxford University Press (OUP!!!) has come to. If you want to learn about Prehistory, you'll probably find more facts in a toddlers' "My first Neanderthal" comic. Anyone who enjoys random discourses about beer consumption in Tucson, the undeniable fluidity of gender, and the crushing weight of white, Western, heterosexual guilt from Prehistory to today, will definitely have a blast, though.
Woke Prehistory is like any other woke discourse: no facts, just ideology. Pure rubbish.
Thank God I didn't buy it, but borrowed it from the library.

[Ufku · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tarihöncesi ya da prehistorik için hominidleri bizimle aynı zihniyette düşünmenin doğru olmadığını belirten yazar, bu belirsizlikleri ve bu sorunları bir kenara bırakarak geçmiş olayları birer hikaye olarak ele alınması gerekirmiş gibi düşünmemizi; bazı şeylerin gerçekte neden yaşanmış olabileceğine odaklanılmasını istiyor. Çünkü bunların tarihsel bir belgesi olmadığından ne zaman olduğunu bilmemiz kesin olarak mümkün değil. Tarihöncesini anlamak hem ampirik hem de felsefi bir işmiş.

[Ahdom · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a great read to introduce the reader to prehistory. It didn't compare to the information presented in Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations, but it is a great foot in the door for the subject. This is a subject that I find endlessly fascinating.

[M. Ashraf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prehistory
A Ver Short Introduction #96
Chris Gosden

From archaeological discoveries; discovering the unknown and the history of life itself, between scientific point of view and the opposite views of the creationist.

To be civilized is to be literate, so that reading and writing are the basis of all education and much of our cultivation as cultured and sensitive human beings.

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Due to the constraints of space imposed by the format (‘very short’, indeed), I found the writing somewhat choppy and jarring. Taken paragraph by paragraph, however, this is a very interesting book on a subject I know little about. Overall, quite enjoyable.

[Martin Best · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really an introduction to the topic, more an introduction to it's possible implications. A bit of a ramble.

[Pommy Nishan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The narrative style is great with good examples... I won't prefer this as an academic book.

[Melissa Barbosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting and informative.