Prehistoric Men

We share this planet with ghosts. Not the spectral kind, but the profound absence of nearly everything we might call human: for 99 percent of our existence, we were hunter-gatherers leaving no written words, no monuments, no kings or empires. Robert J. Braidwood, writing in 1948 at the dawn of carbon dating, invites us into that vast unknown. This slim, electrifying volume reconstructs the lives of people who lived fifty thousand years before the first cities, before agriculture, before pottery even. Through stone tools, cave paintings, and the patient science of archaeology, Braidwood resurrects a world both alien and strangely familiar. The stakes are enormous: understanding who we were may explain who we are becoming. Here is a book that asks us to hold two impossible truths at once we are ancient beyond reckoning, and we are somehow still here.