This book will be a boon to schoolteachers of History, Social Studies or Biology whose classes touch on Stone Age humans, but who themselves are unfamiliar with scientific Palaeolithic archaeology or human evolution. Should this book become more widely accessible—in multiple translations, for example—it would offer an enhanced understanding of the deep roots of humanity to a broad readership.
Barsky strikes a pleasing balance between, on the one hand, imparting technical information—helpfully illustrated by recounting examples of her experiences in meticulous archaeological excavation and expert analysis of stone tools—and, on the other, by explaining how rigorous scientific research into humankind's origins sheds light on its emergent self-awareness, socially and culturally. Imperceptibly, a complex relationship evolved wherein the creation of rudimentary technological products acquired a propensity to reflect associated behavioural enactment; this process imbued these products with non-utilitarian significance via evolving cognitive processes that underpin unrivalled human capacities for creating symbolic references of abstract thoughts and reflexions.
Although I am less sanguine than Barsky about inferring from the Pleistocene record an inexorable cumulative progression of prehistoric technological-cum-cultural developments (see for example: Walker et al. Reference Walker, Manrique and Friston2022b), I nevertheless welcome and recommend her book. Hitherto, not since Gordon Childe's Man Makes Himself (Reference Childe1951 [1936]) has a book on prehistory and archaeology highlighted its author's concerns about those contemporary environmental and societal concerns that colour debates over the foreseeable future that upcoming generations will inherit. Those generations deserve this book. The volume is very different to those dry primers often imposed on first-year Archaeology or Anthropology undergraduates; students may still have to read dull textbooks but, in addition, may now be stimulated by Barsky's volume, which both supplements and contextualises.
With noteworthy expertise in French and Spanish Palaeolithic research, Barsky's enlightened views on current affairs are shared by a wide readership in Europe and the Commonwealth. I worry, however, lest her alternation between ‘I’ and ‘we’ puts off many of those US readers who may feel less complicit than I with her heart-felt world view, yet whom she hopes to convert. I refer especially to some North American scholars who do not reject out-of-hand a view that teaching school pupils about so-called ‘creation science’ could be admissible, provided that it is taught with ‘impartiality’ alongside the teaching of evolution of species by natural selection.
There are some shortcomings in the volume. I would have liked to see the rather brief Index expanded to improve its value. The manuscript would also have benefited from further proof-reading and copy-editing (one sentence on p. 32, for example, even lacks a main verb); several frustrating referencing errors have slipped through production, along with sporadic unconventional use of Latin taxonomic terms. This rather detracts from the otherwise commendable volume. Moreover, Barsky's research experience at Orce in eastern Andalusia makes some bibliographic errors and referencing omissions troubling. Barsky's (p. 71) reference to an account (Toro Moyano et al. Reference Toro-Moyano2013) of a human tooth from the 1.2–1.3 Ma Barranco León site at Orce ignores a more recent review article (Ribot et al. Reference Ribot2015) about the same tooth, as well as—from the same site—a human tooth fragment published initially in Human Evolution (Gibert et al. Reference Gibert1999); the two fossils are the earliest human remains yet known in Western Europe and are therefore of considerable interest. It is also disconcerting that mention (p. 79–80) of excavated evidence of combustion at the sites of Gesher Benot Ya'akov (Israel, 0.78 Ma) and Wonderwerk Cave (South Africa, 1 Ma), both of which have Acheulian handaxes, fails to include a reference to the evidence—70km from Barranco León, at Cueva Negra del Estrecho del Río Quípar at Caravaca in Murcia—of bone and flint combusted at high temperatures (determined by scientists who participated at GBY and Wonderwerk). These finds were buried deep in a sedimentary sequence that also yielded an Acheulian handaxe and is assigned by geophysical and palaeontological research to <1.0–>0.78 Ma, plausibly the 0.867–0.812 Ma interglacial (Walker et al. Reference Walker2016a, Reference Walker2016b, Reference Walker2020, Reference Walker2022a; López Jiménez et al. Reference López Jiménez, Uriarte, Martínez and Walker2020; Linares Matás et al. Reference Linares Matás2021). Conceivably, Homo erectus (and Spain's Atapuerca H. antecessor, contemporaneous with Cueva Negra) recognised that, by taking glowing brands from wildfires, they could set alight wood kept dry for such an eventuality in caves, and thereby deter fierce animals and enjoy light and warmth, without necessarily involving any preparation of hearth structures that are absent from the worldwide archaeological record until 0.4 Ma.
Deborah Barsky's book is a valiant, welcome attempt to stimulate the general public to take an interest in prehistory, and a revised edition certainly should be on the bookshelves of both high-school and public libraries.
