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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2009
You don't need a Weatherman
to know which way the wind blows
Bob Dylan Subterranean homesick blues 1965To begin with …
One revolution invariably led to another. Fire drew some of our earliest ancestors into the circle. Stone tools made them hunters and these handy artefacts later became symbols, embellished by language and art. A life on the move was eventually exchanged for a settled existence that promoted agriculture, and the first civilisations followed. Then came the ancient Empires with their bookkeeping, literacy and the institutions of state power. The momentum they established led to industrialisation whose global ramifications define the contemporary world.
There, as I see it in an extreme digested read, lies the familiar contribution of three million years of prehistory to the larger human story. The investigation of the past is based around the origins of great advances such as technology, language, farming and writing; the where, when and why of becoming human. The origin points for these questions are investigated across the globe and are presented by archaeologists as step changes. Origins and revolutions are sought after as both the source of evidence and the causal device that, in the long corridors of prehistoric time, transformed hominids into humans.
I embarked on this book to question this familiar approach and to challenge what archaeologists regard as change.
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