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Book Review
| After The Ice: A Global Human History 20,000–5000 BC. By Steven Mithen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. xiii + 622 pages. Includes illustrations, notes, bibliography and index. Paper $18.95.
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| After the Ice is an encyclopedic volume of more than six hundred large-format pages, covering fifteen thousand years of the human presence on every continent except Antarctica. The thrust of the narrative, a few caveats by the author notwithstanding, is that the global warming which prompted the waning of the last Ice Age also prompted humans to cross a social Rubicon from a timeless prehistory where "little of significance happened" and people lived "just as their ancestors had been doing for millions of years" (p. 3) into the modern world of historicity, agriculture, towns, and civilization. |
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This book, by a prominent prehistorian, has a number of aims to which many environmental historians will find themselves sympathetic, specifically the attempt to digest and popularize a field for a general audience, and the desire to convince the readership that prime environmental lessons for today may be drawn from the study of the past. In Mithen's case, his most important historical conclusion seems to be that climate change, and global warming in particular, was the instigator and foundation of human society as we know it; the most important corollary lesson is that the looming change in the planet's temperature will in all likelihood have consequences we cannot dream of. Other reflections revolve around the relative worth of civilization and its benefits on the one hand, and, on the other, the social conflicts and environmental degradation which Mithen sees as intrinsic to any group of humans of more than a couple of hundred souls. |
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