Robin Hood's Barn : A Study of Ice Age Culture. This item is unavailable.Robin Hood's Barn : A Study of Ice Age Culture

The Upper Ice Age (40,000–10,000 BC) constitutes a major chapter in human history. But it’s an epoch that has left us with little physical evidence, often depicted in popular culture as a time of brutish cavemen with a primitive understanding of the world in which they lived. This is a complete misunderstanding, and one that poses grave risks to the modern world, according to Arthur Hill Corwin. The reality was that Ice Age people had a sophisticated knowledge of nature, astronomy, geometry and aesthetics—one that lives on to this day through our fairytales, holidays and culture, despite millennia of repression by the agrarian and cosmopolitan cultures that followed it. In Robin Hood’s Barn, Corwin lays out the evidence of an advanced global Ice Age culture with a shared worldview and a shared language. And he shows how we unknowingly encounter with the remains of that culture in our daily lives, in well-known cultural mainstays like unicorns, Robin Hood, Arthur and Guinevere, the eight tiny reindeer and Snow White—and beyond. “In this vast tapestry,” Corwin said, “many unbroken threads lead back to the glacial era. In this increasingly hostile climate, finding one’s place in time and space and the ability to measure both accurately became critical to survival—for timing hunts, storing food and avoiding winter births.” But beyond simply making the case that Ice Age people had attained a highly developed culture, Robin Hood’s Barn goes further, by showing a way forward. For our ancestors, he argues that technological advances were not the sole, or even most important, sign of cultural vitality or human intelligence. And they can show us a way to live with intelligence, without making a nightmare of the world in which we live.