Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization - Hardcover

Gamble, Clive

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 075090321X ISBN 13: 9780750903219

Publisher: Sutton Pub Ltd, 1993

Synopsis

The notion of progress still bedevils our conception of prehistory, with human evolution persistently seen as a movement from inferior to superior, primitive to advanced, simple to complex. Timewalkers extricates prehistory from the myths and distortions created by this view of the past. By focusing on changes in behavior and stressing the deliberate human purpose our ancestors displayed in their migrations, Clive Gamble produces a fresh and frankly provocative synthesis of the archaeology of the last three million years. This new approach to human prehistory proceeds from a detailed study of global colonization rather than a conventional reassessment of fossil remains and stone tools. Gamble reconsiders the remarkable record of geographical expansion that began with the early hominids of sub-Saharan Africa who spread to new continents, to the marginal environments of desert and taiga, and to islands in the oceans and the Mediterranean. Through this astonishing dispersal of humans, which exceeds that of all other mammals, he traces calculated responses to variations in climate and environment. As he interprets these migrations in terms of behavioral change in a social and ecological context, Gamble offers a revealing critique of the attitudes of early European explorers, on which so much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeology unquestioningly rested. Timewalkers makes the latest findings of prehistoric archaeology accessible in a readable, coherent form. Gamble's novel reinterpretation of this evidence, presented with wit and authority, enlarges and enlivens our understanding of human action and motivation in the distant past.

About this title

About the Author

Clive Gamble is Reader in Archaeology at the University of Southampton. He has been involved in archaeological fieldwork in Britain, Russia, Germany, Greece, Jordan, Alaska, and Australia.

From Library Journal

The author, a British anthropologist and archaeologist, asserts that fundamental issues about world prehistory go unexamined and that the question we ought to be asking is, "Why were humans everywhere?" In the course of exploring this question, Gamble draws upon a stunning range of sources, from fossil and tool-making finds of the past two centuries to routes of global colonization that lead out of sub-Saharan Africa. Gamble's ability to present an enormous depth and breadth of information in a clean and often witty style is nothing short of breathtaking. He argues that colonization was a purposeful process, the result of behavioral change or "exaptation" rather than "adaptation." Gamble aims throughout to emphasize our common humanity with our ancestors in prehistory. His questions and vision will no doubt raise intense scholarly debates. Recommended for informed readers and specialists.
- Joan Gartland, Detroit P.L.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sutton Pub Ltd
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 075090321X
• ISBN 13: 9780750903219
• Binding: Hardcover