First published in 2016, Prehistoric Investigations has been brought fully up to date in this new edition
How do you infer the existence of a hitherto-unknown human species from a fragmentary finger bone? Why do we walk on two legs? Were Neanderthals really dimwitted? How did a small, solitary predator become the world’s most popular pet? What was the ancient link between languages spoken in places as far apart as Iceland and India?
These are just some of the questions faced by those seeking to unravel the secrets of the vast period of time that predates the last six thousand years of ‘recorded history’. In addition to fieldwork and traditional methods, paleoanthropologists and archaeologists now draw upon genetics and other cutting-edge scientific techniques. In fifty chapters, Prehistoric Investigations tells the story of the many thought-provoking discoveries that have transformed our understanding of the distant past.
AN OMNIBUS EDITION OF THE ‘IN SEARCH OF’ SERIES
The ‘In Search of’ series of twelve 12,000-word Kindle short reads has been a highly successful follow-up to Christopher Seddon’s full-sized works ‘Humans: from the Beginning’, ‘Prehistoric Investigations’, and ‘Astronomy: from the Beginning’. Here, all twelve short reads are presented in a single volume.
FEATURING:
THE FIRST HOMININS
Before the first humans came the age of the australopithecines – apes that walked upright like humans, but with brains no larger than those of chimpanzees.
HOMO ERECTUS
In the late nineteenth century, Dutch anthropologist Eugène Dubois found the first example of an extinct human that had lived significantly before Homo sapiens.
THE ACHEULEAN HAND AXE
A multifunction tool that remained in use, more or less unchanged, for 1,750,000 years.
PILTDOWN MAN
The story of the most notorious hoax in the history of palaeoanthropology.
MUDDLE IN THE MIDDLE
How Homo sapiens emerged into a world shared with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and ‘hobbits’.
FIRST USE OF FIRE
Darwin described the discovery of fire as “probably the greatest, excepting language, ever made by man” – but how was it made?
NEANDERTHALS
The term has been used in a negative context for decades, but why do Neanderthals get such a bad rap?
EARLY FUNERARY PRACTICES
Mourning and remembering the dead is a very ancient part of the human condition, but it may not be confined to modern or even archaic humans.
THE ORIGINS OF HOMO SAPIENS
How our understanding of human origins has developed over the centuries, from the Great Chain of Being to modern theories.
PREHISTORIC ART
The discovery of the first cave art shattered nineteenth-century perceptions that the people of that era were primitive savages.
EARLY SEAFARERS
The oldest-known boats are only around 12,000 years old, but seafaring could predate the emergence of modern humans.
EARLY METALLURGY
For most of their existence, humans made tools from stone and bone. How did they learn about copper, bronze, and iron?
The incredible story of how we learned about the Universe, from the earliest prehistoric observations to the first telescopes.
Early astronomy ranks among the greatest achievements of the human intellect. But how did astronomers of the pre-telescopic era make accurate observations of the Sun, Moon, and planets, and predict their movements? And how can we uncover the ancient knowledge of societies that left few or no written records? The answers are in this fascinating book, which explores the history of astronomy, from prehistoric times to the Renaissance and the birth of modern science. Written by the author of a major guide to prehistory, it is even-handed, accessible, and avoids sensationalism.
While aimed at the general reader, it is also fully referenced for students and academics. Among the topics discussed, you will discover:
★ Why some archaeologists believe that Stonehenge and other Neolithic stone monuments served astronomical functions ranging from lunar and solar markers to ‘megalithic observatories’, which tracked the movements of Sun and Moon with great precision.
★ What evidence there is that present-day constellations including Taurus and Orion were depicted in Upper Palaeolithic cave art.
★ How a ‘void’ zone in the star maps of the ancient world – corresponding to stars not visible from the Mediterranean – suggests that many constellations were devised by late Bronze Age sailors as an aid to navigation.
★ How the early Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, and Maya civilisations all developed advanced astronomical methods, for needs ranging from the compilation of reliable calendars to the prediction of eclipses and other ominous celestial phenomena.
★ How ancient Greek astronomers and mathematicians sought to explain as well as predict the movements of celestial bodies; and how their efforts culminated with Ptolemy’s pivotal Almagest, which set out the ‘Theory of Everything’ of the ancient world.
★ Why Islamic Golden Age scholars did far more than simply keep alive the ancient world’s intellectual tradition during the medieval period; and how they refined it and laid the mathematical foundations for the Copernican revolution.
★ How Copernicus demoted the earth from its place at the centre of the universe; and how Kepler, Galileo, and Newton went on to bring about an essentially modern understanding of the Solar System and the laws that govern it.