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Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological Evidence of the Lived Lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children
Winner of the 2023 European Association of Archaeologist’s Book of the Year Award
In prehistoric societies children comprised 40–65% of the population, yet by default, our ancestral landscapes are peopled by adults who hunt, gather, fish, knap tools, and make art. But these adults were also parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles who had to make space physically, emotionally, intellectually, and cognitively for the infants, children, and adolescents around them.
Growing Up in the Ice Age is a timely and evidence-based look at the lived lives of Paleolithic children and the communities of which they were a part. By rendering these ‘invisible’ children visible, readers will gain a new understanding of the Paleolithic period as a whole, and in doing so will learn how children have contributed to the biological and cultural entities we are today.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Jane Baxter
1. Toward an archaeology of Paleolithic children
2. Birth and the Paleolithic ‘family’
3. Toys, burials and secret spaces
4. Stone tools, skill acquisition and learning a craft
5. Children, oral storytelling and the Paleolithic ‘arts’
6. Adolescence in the Ice Age
7. Paleolithic children as drivers of human evolution
Appendix 1. Chronology of the Paleolithic and timeline of fossil hominins
Appendix 2. Table of subadult fossils in the Plio-Pleistocene (perinatal–ca. 10 years)
Appendix 3. Table of subadult fossils from the Plio-Pleistocene (ca. 10 years–20 years).
Bibliography
Index
In prehistoric societies children comprised 40–65% of the population, yet by default, our ancestral landscapes are peopled by adults who hunt, gather, fish, knap tools, and make art. But these adults were also parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles who had to make space physically, emotionally, intellectually, and cognitively for the infants, children, and adolescents around them.
Growing Up in the Ice Age is a timely and evidence-based look at the lived lives of Paleolithic children and the communities of which they were a part. By rendering these ‘invisible’ children visible, readers will gain a new understanding of the Paleolithic period as a whole, and in doing so will learn how children have contributed to the biological and cultural entities we are today.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Jane Baxter
1. Toward an archaeology of Paleolithic children
2. Birth and the Paleolithic ‘family’
3. Toys, burials and secret spaces
4. Stone tools, skill acquisition and learning a craft
5. Children, oral storytelling and the Paleolithic ‘arts’
6. Adolescence in the Ice Age
7. Paleolithic children as drivers of human evolution
Appendix 1. Chronology of the Paleolithic and timeline of fossil hominins
Appendix 2. Table of subadult fossils in the Plio-Pleistocene (perinatal–ca. 10 years)
Appendix 3. Table of subadult fossils from the Plio-Pleistocene (ca. 10 years–20 years).
Bibliography
Index
384 pages, Paperback
Published June 14, 2021
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August 31, 2024This is quite dry (it’s more scholarly than popular science), but
a) it’s astonishing how much information archeological research can plausibly draw from scant remains and reasonable inference, and
b) there’s something evocative and touching and human about evidence of things like an adult female holding a child on her hip as they both make art on a cave wall, or a sick puppy nursed back to health by, perhaps, an adolescent 14,000 years ago.
a) it’s astonishing how much information archeological research can plausibly draw from scant remains and reasonable inference, and
b) there’s something evocative and touching and human about evidence of things like an adult female holding a child on her hip as they both make art on a cave wall, or a sick puppy nursed back to health by, perhaps, an adolescent 14,000 years ago.
Displaying 1 of 1 review