Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans - Softcover

Fagan, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1608194051 ISBN 13: 9781608194056

Publisher: Bloomsbury Press, 2011

Synopsis

They survived by their wits in a snowbound world, hunting, and sometimes being hunted by, animals many times their size. By flickering firelight, they drew bison, deer, and mammoths on cavern walls- vibrant images that seize our imaginations after thirty thousand years. They are known to archaeologists as the Cro-Magnons-but who were they? Simply put, these people were among the first anatomically modern humans. For millennia, their hunter-gatherer culture flourished in small pockets across Ice Age Europe, the distant forerunner to the civilization we live in now.

Bestselling author Brian Fagan brings these early humans out of the deep freeze with his trademark mix of erudition, cutting-edge science, and vivid storytelling. Cro-Magnon reveals human society in its infancy, facing enormous environmental challenges from glaciers, predators, and a rival species of humans-the Neanderthals. Cro-Magnon captures the adaptability that has made humans an unmatched success as a species. Living on a frozen continent with only crude tools, Ice Age humans survived and thrived. In these pages, we meet our most remarkable ancestors.

About this title

About the Author

Brian Fagan was born in England and spent several years doing fieldwork in Africa. He is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of New York Times bestseller The Great Warming and many other books, including Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World, and several books on climate history, including The Little Ice Age and The Long Summer.

From AudioFile

Fagan's history of the emergence of modern humans spans tens of thousands of years, but his perspective is personal and immediate. His work is based on decades of study of ancient artifacts and visits to archaeological sites around the world. James Langton, who surely possesses one of the most listenable voices in audiobooks today, fits easily into the persona Fagan has defined, creating a narrative perspective that is attentive, observant, factual, open to speculation, and never dogmatic in tone. Langton's perfectly articulated rendering keeps the narrative line clear, even when its dates and names might be crowding the listener's mind. One misses the illustrations and maps contained in the book. (The book and audiobook are best experienced together.) But Fagan excels in powers of description, and he receives his due here with a narrator as engaged and as discerning as he is. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1608194051
• ISBN 13: 9781608194056
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320