Doris Lessing Literary Review Will transform our view of B.C. Informationen zum Autor Richard Rudgley is an Oxford-trained scholar of Stone Age art, religion and technology. He is also the author of Essential Substances: A Cultural History of Intoxicants in Society (for which he won the British Museum Prometheus Award) and The Encyclopaedia of Psychoactive Substances and the editor of Wildest Dreams: An Anthology of Drug-Related Literature. He lives with his wife and two children in Notting Hill, London. Klappentext An authoritative, eye-opening look at Stone Age civilizations that explodes traditional portrayals of prehistoryThe rise of historical civilization 5,000 years ago is often depicted as if those societies were somehow created out of nothing. However, recent discoveries of astonishing accomplishments from the Neolithic Age -- in art, technology, writing, math, science, religion, medicine and exploration -- demand a fundamental rethinking of humanity before the dawn of written history.In this fascinating book, Richard Rudgley describes how-- The intrepid explorers of the Stone Age discovered all of the world's major land masses long before the so-called Age of Discovery-- Stone Age man performed medical operations, including amputations and delicate cranial surgeries-- Paleolithic cave artists of Western Europe used techniques that were forgotten until the Renaissance-- Prehistoric life expectancy was better than it is for contemporary third-world populationsRudgley reminds us just how savage so-called civilized people can be, and demonstrates how the cultures that have been reviled as savage were truly civilized. The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age shows the great debt that contemporary society owes to its prehistoric predecessors. It is a rich introduction to a lost world that will redefine the meaning of civilization itself. Introduction A near-universal theme in the mythologies of the world is that the present state of the world, and more specifically the social world, is in decline -- a fall from the Garden of Eden or from a Golden Age. Modern civilisation has turned these traditional mythological assumptions on their head and written a new script, one based on the idea of social progress and evolution. In this new mythology the notion of civilisation (as it is generally understood) replaces Eden and this novel paradise exists not at the beginning of time but, if not right now, then just around the corner. Civilisation is, in the plot of this new mythology, envisaged as a great success story -- from prehistoric rags to civilised riches -- and it is presented as the final flowering of human achievement born out of a long and interminable struggle against the powers of darkness and ignorance that are represented by the Stone Age. The way in which the human story has been written to date is so abridged and poorly edited that it has provided us with an account of ourselves which leaves out most of the contents of the early chapters. Despite the fact that prehistory makes up more than 95 per cent of our time on this planet, history, the remaining 5 per cent, makes up at least 95 per cent of most accounts of the human story. The prehistory of humankind is no mere prelude to history; history is rather a colourful and eventful afterword to the Stone Age. In this book I will show how rich and eventful were the contents of these early chapters of the life of our species; how great is the debt of historical societies to their prehistoric counterparts in all spheres of cultural life; and how civilised in many respects were those human cultures that have been reviled as savage. Before doing so I shall show how savage the so-called civilised peoples can be, and how the barbarism of our own culture is projected outward into the geographically remote (modern tribal cultures) as well as into the temporally remote prehistoric cultures. One might expect that anthro...

Autorentext

Richard Rudgley is an Oxford-trained scholar of Stone Age art, religion and technology. He is also the author of Essential Substances: A Cultural History of Intoxicants in Society (for which he won the British Museum Prometheus Award) and The Encyclopaedia of Psychoactive Substances and the editor of Wildest Dreams: An Anthology of Drug-Related Literature. He lives with his wife and two children in Notting Hill, London.

Klappentext

An authoritative, eye-opening look at Stone Age civilizations that explodes traditional portrayals of prehistoryThe rise of historical civilization 5,000 years ago is often depicted as if those societies were somehow created out of nothing. However, recent discoveries of astonishing accomplishments from the Neolithic Age -- in art, technology, writing, math, science, religion, medicine and exploration -- demand a fundamental rethinking of humanity before the dawn of written history.In this fascinating book, Richard Rudgley describes how
-- The intrepid explorers of the Stone Age discovered all of the world's major land masses long before the so-called Age of Discovery
-- Stone Age man performed medical operations, including amputations and delicate cranial surgeries
-- Paleolithic cave artists of Western Europe used techniques that were forgotten until the Renaissance
-- Prehistoric life expectancy was better than it is for contemporary third-world populationsRudgley reminds us just how savage so-called civilized people can be, and demonstrates how the cultures that have been reviled as savage were truly civilized. The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age shows the great debt that contemporary society owes to its prehistoric predecessors. It is a rich introduction to a lost world that will redefine the meaning of civilization itself.

Inhalt

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Stone Age
The Mother Tongue
A New Rosetta Stone
The Signs of Old Europe: Writing or Pre-Writing?
The Paleolithic Origins of Writing
Paleoscience
From Footprints to Fingerprints
Under the Knife
Stone Age Surgery
Pyrotechnology
Back to the Grindstone
The Stone Age Mining Industry
Ochre: Blood of the Earth
Venus Figurines: Sex Objects or Symbols?
The Song of the Stalactites
The First Fossil Hunters
The Four Bones of Bilzingsleben
Graven Images from the Holy Land
Dawn Stones or False Dawn?

Afterword

Bibliography

List of Plates

List of Figures

Picture Acknowledgments

Index