THE ROOTS OF CIVILIZATION; The Cognitive Beginnings of Mans First Art, Symbol and Notation

large black full cloth hardbound 4to ~ 4º (quarto ~ 9"x11") very large "coffee table" size book, international or priority shipping will cost extra. dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. fine cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. contents free of markings. dustwrapper in vg cond., rubbed, 3" tear on front, large scratch on rear. not price clipped (no price listed). nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking , underlining, remainder markings etc ~ first edition so stated. first printing (nap). high quality book club edition (small emboosed spot rear cover bottom near spine). 413p. postscript. acknowledgments. collection of materials. bibliography. (list of) sites and caves. list of illustrations. index. 203 maps. 225 b&w photos. drawing & figiures. archaeology. art history. prehistoric art. archaeoastronomy. lunar zodiacs. prehistory. history of astronomy. ancient art. shamanism. ancient religion.~ Surely one of the most extraordinary books ever published, The Roots of Civilization by Alexander Marshack sheds new light on the evolution and prehistoric development of man which will radically alter the thinking of all archaeologists and anthropologists throughout the world. By examining the artifacts and the cave drawings of the Ice Age, Marshack has opened up new pathways to the origins of man's thought, his use of symbol notation and of language. What he has discovered would, in fact, make it seem likely that man was capable of complex thought processes thousands of years before it had ever been considered possible. Hallam Movius, the noted Harvard archaeologist, has this to say about the research, already hailed by leaders in the field as a "revolution": "A major breakthrough in the field of the interpretation and understanding of Upper Paleolithic art. Marshack's results have thrown revolutionary new light on the intellectual level attained by our Upper Paleolithic forebears. These spectacular studies have contributed startlingly new and fundamentally important evidence on the evolutionary level of early man's cognitive and intellectual capacity and on the level of symbolic development he had attained . " Marshack writes clearly and with great detail about how he set out to do his work and how he made his amazing discoveries. He takes the reader every step of the way, almost as if he were telling a detective story. We have here, richly illustrated and carefully annotated, the first complete account of these critical new findings, findings which add greatly to our knowledge of the first modern men to appear in Europe, the hunters of horse, mammoth, bison, reindeer and rhinoceros, who roamed the lands below the great ice sheets during the period 35,000~10,000 B.C., thousands of years before agriculture and the first towns.…