Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind

PREHISTORY covers human existence before written records, i.e. most of human existence. But it also refers to a field of study, the discipline through which we scrutinize prehistoric times. This book begins by looking at the gradual discovery only 150 years ago of a remote human past going back tens of thousands of years and the subsequent dramatic growth of the study of prehistory: early archaeology; geology; Darwin's ideas of evolution; cave paintings; fossil discoveries of human ancestors; museums and collections; and then in the 1950s radiocarbon dating and, in the 1980s, DNA analysis. Colin Renfrew then looks at current issues and problems in prehistory. He challenges the conventional assumption of an all-important 'human revolution' 40 000 years ago - when homosapiens first appeared in Europe - and suggests that the key developments were much later.