The popular view of Stone Age man as a primitive and ignorant forerunner of ourselves is shattered as Richard Rudgley reveals the myriad and remarkable accomplishments made before the dawn of history.
A thousand years before the pharaohs erected their pyramids, prehistoric people on the tiny Mediterranean island of Gozo were building megalithic temples - the world's oldest stone buildings.
Startling new research on the 5,300-year-old Ice Man, whose body was found a few years ago in an Alpine glacier, reveals that acupuncture was practised in prehistoric Europe long before it began in China.
Remarkable discoveries are still being made at the settlement of Catalhoyuk in Turkey where one of the first experiments in urban living took place 9,000 years ago. In this giant anthill of mud-brick buildings people buried the dead under the floors of their houses and adorned their walls with enigmatic symbols - vultures, headless men, female breasts and bulls' horns.
The journey takes us even further back in time to the awe-inspiring cave paintings of Ice Age France and to engraved bones that reveal that lunar calendars were being recorded 30,000 years ago. The grave of a four-year-old boy decorated with red ochre and buried with offerings of animal bones shows that the Neandertals were not an evolutionary dead-end. Careful study of the skeleton has shown that he was part "Homo sapiens" and part Neandertal.
Even before the Neandertals early man was able to accomplish remarkable things. Stone tools found on the isolated island of Flores in eastern Indonesia show that "Homo erectus" may have undertaken voyages on rafts across the open sea an incredible 700,000 years before Kon-tiki!
No one who reads the book will be able to see their own prehistoric ancestors in the same light again.
