RTT Quarterly January-March 2024 Prehistoric

I thought I would go ahead and get our next quarter’s read posted as this time period is always the most difficult one for me to find books.
This quarter (Jan-March) we will be reading in the Prehistoric Age. As you can imagine, the definition of this time period varies greatly. For the purposes of this activity, though, we will date the prehistoric age from the beginning of the earth (whatever you believe that to be) and ending about 600 BCE. The ending date is subjective, so if you have another cutting off point, please feel free to use it!

The prehistoric age is divided into different epochs:
Paleolithic Era (Old Stone Age)
Neolithic Era (New Stone Age)
Bronze Age
Iron Age

And then the ice age(s) fit in there somewhere!

Both fiction and non-fiction can be used for this quarter’s reads. Time travel could also work.

Some of these books were suggested and read previously by RTT members, both past and present:



The Many Colored Land by Julian May
Raptor Red by Robert Baker
The Seven Daughters of Eve
The Inheritors by William Golding
Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwell
The Dog Master: A Novel of the First Dog
People of the Wolf (North America's Forgotten Past Book Series of 14 Books)
Before Scotland: The Story of Scotland before History
Dinorella: A Prehistoric Fairy Tale by Pamela Duncan Edwards
Prehistoric America (Landmark books, 11) by Anne Terry White
The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel
The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace
Primordial Earth: Book 1 (The Extinction Series - A Prehistoric, Post-Apocalyptic, Sci-Fi Thriller) by Baleigh Higgins
Daughter of Kura by Debra Austin
Come Into My Cave by Linda Hardy

Please let us know what you are reading and perhaps any suggestions from your past reading!

The Wiki: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Reading_Through_Time_Quarterly_Theme_Rea...

I am possibly going to read Scenes From Prehistoric Life by Francis Pryor, which is on Kindle Unlimited. Although I have always meant to read The Clan of the Cave Bear.

I will have to put in my two cents worth for Stig of the Dump - my boys and I loved it!

Although Cornwell and Golding are calling and I may get to them, assuming my library has them........On my shelf:
The Death of a Neanderthal (non-fiction) by Lonnie Goff
The Denisovans: The History of the Extinct Archaic Humans Who Spread Across Asia during the Paleolithic Era (non-fiction)
Come Into My Cave by Linda Hardy

>2 JayneCM: I read the blurb on Stig of the Dump. If my library has it, I will also read that one.

I can also vouch for The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace ( read 2016, rated 3.5*...debated between 3.5/4)

I have three books that I've stacked for this prompt:

• At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of Our Universe's First Seconds (by Dan Hooper; narrated by Graham Winton) - LOL, If I'm gonna go pre-historic, I'm going to go all the way!
• The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World (by Steve Brusatte) - A book about dinosaurs that's for grown-ups!
• The Rise and Reign of Mammals: A New History from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us (by Steve Brusatte) - This one only if I like the dinosaurs one

I have got After the ice on my pile..

>5 MissWatson: One of my favorite books during my pre-historic reading in the last years. Long, occasionally too long winded but worth it IMO :)

Coincidentally, my husband just finished reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (by David Graeber and David Wengrow). It's a new way of looking archaeology and challenging past theories on how prehistoric communities/societies lived & developed. Now, every morning on our dog walk, he shares something he just found out and; on Sundays, he wants to watch a Time Travel episode. We just watched the one about Durrington's Woodhenge and the possibility it and nearby Stonehenge were large ceremonial sites for funerary rites. This morning, I got a mini-lesson about the Amesbury Archer!

>7 Tanya-dogearedcopy: Love it!

I read Marija Gimbutas's The Language of the Goddess for this time period back in 2016, and I've had The Civilization of the Goddess in TBR unread for years, so I'll probably go with that one. Gimbutas is interesting though somewhat controversial.

A couple others I see in my TBRs are Steve Brusatte's The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World and David Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.

If possible this year, I do want to stick with books I've already got and I may go back to working on the ROOTs group.

ETA: I read Harry Harrison's West of Eden years ago. It's the first of a trilogy, and I might reread it and see whether I want to get hold of the other two books. It's an alternate history in which dinosaurs have survived and humans are a recent competitor.

>9 CurrerBell: Oh, interesting about the Harry Harrison. I think I've got this on a shelf somewhere...

>5 MissWatson: I just started this and was looking for reviews. I’m going to star this thread!

>3 Tess_W: I second the crace book, actually most of his are excellent including quaratine a take on the story of Jesus during his 40 days in the wilderness.

stonehedge by bernard cornwallis one of my favorite books on the subject

I am determined to read from my shelves and thought that I didn't have anything for this quarter, but I remembered that I do have a book about Skara Brae, and another one about the different neolithic sites on the Orkney Islands, so I plan to read those!

My aim is to read from my shelves as well and, as I have Before Scotland: The Story of Scotland Before History I've plucked it from the shelf when I finally found it.

>14 Familyhistorian: Oh, that's fantastic! That book has been on my WL for a long time. I'm looking forward to your comments when you have read it.

>15 MissBrangwen: My track record for finishing books for challenges isn't stellar but knowing that you are looking forward to my response to the book will help keep me going. Thanks!

Finished my first two reads and they were duds!

The Death of a Neanderthal by Lonnie Goff. This was a short, poorly written book. By poorly written, I mean misspellings, incorrect punctuation, etc. If the author can't even get that correct, what about the information? I have my doubts about the 500 million years ago.....anyway. Not impressed at all. There really wasn't anything in this book that would be a surprise to anybody. 101 pages 2 stars (I should have DNF'd it, but it was so short.....)

The Denisovans by Charles River Editors About a species (not a word I concur with or would use) of man, related to the Neanderthals. They found 5 skeletons in a cave in Russia in 2008. However, Neanderthals and homo sapiens also used this cave, so I'm not sure what good DNA analysis may be. I am not learned enough to argue anything on these prehistoric topics, except the dates used by anthropologists or paleontologists are not what is usually used by historians. Quite frankly.....I'm bored with this type of book that argues dates and dates and dates! Sadly, I'm just not interested enough to do any research myself. 49 pages 2.5 stars RTT-Prehistoric

>16 Familyhistorian: I know what you mean, no pressure! :-)

So, I went all the way back to the very, very beginning! I listened to At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of Our Universe's First Seconds (by Dan Hooper; narrated by Graham Winton). The author is a particle physicist and cosmologist who specializes in dark matter. In this book, he explains in layman’s terms what has been proven in terms of the Big Bang theory, what still remains a mystery and some of the issues astrophysicists are challenged with.

So here’s the thing: I am absolutely fascinated by quantum physics. Do I understand it? No. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to overcome my Newtonian physics education and limitations. I’m someone who struggles after two chapters of calculus, so everything needs to be “explained to me like I’m five”. For the most part, this book succeeds in presenting very complex science in a way I could grasp. But that said, somewhere around the last fifteen percent of the book, I got lost. So now, I might be a smidgen smarter than I was before I started this book; but I’m grateful I’ll never have to take a test on it!

Total non-sequitur: I always imagined astrophysicists as sitting in observatories and peering through telescopes. In reality, they are looking at raw data transmitted by space telescopes, creating mathematical formulas and writing computer programs. Not quite as “sexy” or romantic as stargazing as I thought 😂

>19 Tanya-dogearedcopy: Someone whom you might find of interest is the physicist-cosmologist Heinz Pagels, who had quite a talent for translating technical science into lay terms. He died in 1988 in a mountain-climbing accident near Aspen. (See Wikipedia article.) I've read The Cosmic Code and Perfect Symmetry and would highly recommend them, although they may be a bit dated today.

His widow, Elaine Pagels, is a highly regarded theologian and MacArthur Fellowship recipient who's written extensively on gnosticism, particularly the Gospel of Thomas (which we're going to be turning to in several weeks in a Bible Study group I'm part of).

For this month, would mythology qualify? I'm thinking of doing a read of the Finnish Kalevala on Kindle. Or would it better fit into next quarter? (Though I'm not sure if it would fit into "Ancient and Biblical Times" better than it would into prehistory.) I don't at all mind holding off on Kalevala because I do have other books for the first quarter that I definitely want to get to, but I just want to make sure I get the correct time period.

Not knowing anything about mythology, I'm going to let you make the call. My only thought would be if it's about creation mythology, it would fit here.

>22 Tess_W: Gotca, and thanks!

I finished Come into my Cave by Linda Hardy. This was a prehistoric novel that centered on a young boy and his scandalous idea overwintering in a cave instead of making the long arduous trip south. His "people" did not live in caves as it was the abode of animals. In this particular cave, an alusia is seen tending to her babies. The description makes this animal seem as if it is a small dinosaur. I did a quick search of Google and I can't find such an animal. An integral component of the plot is who is more dangerous: man or animal? I feel as if this book might be a YA book, however there is no indication that is the case. I picked this up at a Friends of the Library sale for 10 cents--and it was worth that and no more! I got the stinkers from my shelf out of the way and now I'm going to get serious: Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwell. 3 stars 96 pages.

excellent choice! one of my fav books on the subject by one of my fav authors

The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is on gutenberg.org. I may do a re-read.

>26 mnleona: After reading the blurb for Lost World, it reminds of Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

I read Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwell It is a 497 page novel about the building of Stonehenge. IMHO, it was more about the actual transport of said stones, which is conjecture, and paganism than anything else. I was not impressed. I have read better concerning Stonehenge, but I can't put my finger on the title or author. I read Cornwell's Last Kingdom and loved it. Stonehenge, with it's plethora of minor characters that I could not keep up with, not so much. 497 pages 3 (barely)*, RTT Prehistoric Times P.S. I've been to Stonehenge, and it's marvelous in that it makes you wonder! The plains of Salisbury are magnificent in their quietness.

>7 Tanya-dogearedcopy: That Time Travel episode. Is that the actual name? Where do you stream that from?

>28 Tess_W: Im so sorry!

>30 cindydavid4: Nothing to be sorry about! It just didn't float my boat as it did for some!

>29 Tess_W: It’s actually called “Time Team” and you can catch it on YouTube. Every site the archaeology team goes to has three days to dig around and uncover evidence of the past. It’s focused in the UK and they are usually looking fur something specific like the walls of a Medieval church. Lots of tramping about fields, digging test trenches and finding more than one time period at a location. 🙂

>32 Tanya-dogearedcopy: Wow, off to find it and mark it!

ETA Found it! Marked as a fav!

Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations, Great Courses video (36 ½-hour episodes) with instructor Brian Fagan 3***, and see my review. A bit disappointing, considering the usual higher quality of the Great Courses, but a large part of the problem is that it's twenty-years old and some of the material just isn't up to date (which is no fault of the instructor, who's really quite good).

Considering I'm spending one-to-two hours a day nebulizing for COPD, I'll be doing more Great Courses (Wondrium) videos, which I can watch sitting upright at a desktop PC while I nebulize. Wondrium has several other videos that would fit this time period, so I'm going to get my money's worth out of my $150/year subscription and do a good bit of watching for this quarter – and in fact well on into the future, because there are videos for just about every quarterly time period that we have, with an especial load of Biblical videos for the second quarter of this year.

They've also got some tantalizing-looking videos on the Black Death (one series of which includes episodes on both Boccaccio and Chaucer), on Anatomy-Physiology, and on Cancer – all of which will fit the March theme.

>20 CurrerBell: thought the name pagels sounded familiar, Ive read several of Elaines books, including gospel of thomas. very enlightening about early christianity aka gnosticism.

erg, had a complete post that went off to some part of the web....anyway I read a book for last years theme of revolution mixed harvest : stories from the Human Past. fascinatng exploration of the first agricultural revolution after the ice age. He writes this as stories about the people who over time developed villages, cities, and civiliattions. What I loved is that each story is based on evidence from the archaolgical record (in fact I ofter stopped reading so I could find out more about the evidence on google and Wiki

From the introduction: In the space of a few thousand years agriculture dominated the earth. We live with it all around us. History began, cities soared, the landscape was crisscrossed with roads ?�. Each story is prefaced by a short introduction and followed by some context in order to stitch the narrative together. Some stories are linked, but most are independent. The stories are gathered into three chapters: ?Shelter, ? ?House, ? and ?Home. ? These represent a progression in where we lived, a series of transformations in technology and consciousness.

a perfect book for this theme i think
"

I just finished The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World (by Steve Brusatte) and I loved it! First off, it’s a book about dinosaurs for adults— pop science in tone and style to be sure; but no magic treehouse or singing purple things 😂 What amazes me is the number advances in the field of paleontology in the past twenty years. More readily accessible technology, discoveries in China and new mathematical/statistical modeling have opened up a lot of “secrets” and corrected a lot of mistakes about the studies into the Mesozoic Era. There’s another book by the same author about The Rise and Reign of Mammals that I’m looking forward to starting soon.

(I just put a couple of fossil parks on my bucket list— living in the Western part of the US makes actually checking this off of my list easier to tackle than if I still lived on the East Coast). 🦕🦖

>34 CurrerBell: Sorry to hear how much time you're having to spend on the nebulizer. Since I've moved to the north Georgia mountains, I've rarely had to use mine, though I do wear a mask on my walks in the spring time.

>35 cindydavid4: She's one of my favorites.

I finally read my first book for this quarterly topic: Maeshowe and the Heart of Neolithic Orkney by Sally Foster. This publication by Historic Scotland that I bought on a trip to Orkney is rather short, but still includes a lot of information about the Neolithic sites on the Orkney Islands.

I completed Rhinos in Nebraska: The Amazing Discovery of the Ashfall Fossil Beds by Alison Pearce Stevens This book is about the discovery of and implications of the Ashfall Fossil Beds in Antelope County, Nebraska. The author asserts that 10-12 million years ago (sigh!) there was an explosion in what is now near Yellowstone that produced a cloud of volcanic ash that drifted eastward causing the animals to inhale it and die. Fossil remains were first found in 1971 by a 17-year old farmer when a juvenile rhino skull was poking out of the ground. The site is still being excavated. To date they have found over 19 skeletal remains of hippo like creatures related to the horse, camels, sabre-toothed tigers, and a dog-like bone crushing mammal, among others. Great quick overview of the discovery and remains. 135 pages 4 stars RTT Prehistoric

I have finished my non-fiction read at long last, After the ice, and found it rather disappointing. Mostly because the narrative device of having an unseen observer travel through time and space and watching changes unfold simply did not work for me.

>32 Tanya-dogearedcopy: I checked them also. Thanks for the information.

>27 Tess_W: I first read Journey to the Center of the Earth when I was in Jr. Hi in the 1950s and still count of one of my favorites.

>40 MissBrangwen: I could not find that book but I have requested
Amanda Brend
Title:
Landscapes revealed : geophysical survey in the heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Area 2002-2011
from my interloan library.

I will be going there on a cruise this year.

>45 mnleona: Oh, how wonderful! It is such a special place.
You will probably be able to buy the book on site if you wish, because it was published by Historic Scotland.

>46 MissBrangwen: I will look for it. Thanks.

Reread mixed harvest mainly so I could re vist the different archaegial he has included that connect with the stories. I originally read this for the 'revoltion' thread as he starts with the "agricultural revolution in the Neolethic age" heres a summary I liked

"The stories in Mixed Harvest tell of love, conflict, religion, growing up, birth and death; all things that we are familiar with. The people in the stories were dealing with all of this in a rapidly changing world, not too different from the one we are living in today. There is knowledge to be gained from their past mistakes and past triumphs. The writing evokes a familiarity without breaking what we know of human communication at the time. Feelings are conveyed without speech, using broad concepts to show emotion without words. Mixed Harvest is an insightful and unique style of storytelling that helps connect us to our past.

I know it's not quite the end of the quarter, but I'm going to have to call it at the two books I've read:

• 13.787± 0.020 billion years ago - At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of Our Universe's First Seconds (by Dan Hooper; narrated by Graham Winton) and;
• 252-66 million years ago - The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World (by Steve Brusatte)

Both books illustrate significant discoveries and advances within the past twenty years, primarily owing to progress in mathematical modeling, computer programming and testing against past discoveries (correcting errors and uncovering new things). And though sitting in an observatory to see the stars or digging though the rock to find fossils is important, the value of being able to analyze the finds is at least equally if not more so. Each field of inquiry, while shedding light on the past, seeks to apply its finds to the present and future. I recommend both books though the one about dinosaurs is a little bit more accessible in style and content. The book about cosmology/astrophysics gets a little mind-bendy in the last third/quarter. Still, it's all pretty amazing.

I started Neanderthal: Neanderthal man and the story of human origins by Paul Jordan in February for this topic and was hoping I could finish it by the end of the month, or at least have it mostly completed. Unfortunately, that didn't work out. The book itself was dense and slow to read. I also wound up with a lot of days where I didn't have any time to read because we had a lot of chores to complete before my DH had knee surgery, and after the surgery I was busy taking care of him and having to handle on-going chores by myself. But I was finally able to finish Neanderthal yesterday.

The book opens with the discovery of the first Neanderthal remains in Germany and goes on to discuss the subsequent finds in multiple places. Jordan reports on the changing interpretations of the various Neanderthal finds. He includes a lot of technical information on the bones that have been recovered, as well as the tools used by the Neanderthals, and summarizes the theories about the Neanderthal way of life. He goes on to include background information on the world before the Neanderthals, and the evolution of human species. He discusses reasons why Neanderthals may have disappeared and why modern humans were able to out-compete the Neanderthals.

Neanderthal was published in 1999, so although it discusses DNA evidence, what they had at that time was early results of testing. They only had mtDNA results at the time the book came out, and researchers found no DNA evidence of relationship to modern humans. Of course, subsequent testing has shown that modern humans do carry some Neanderthal DNA, so I now want to find a book that covers more recent findings. Jordan does point out that some European populations have skeletal features that appear to have a possible Neanderthal influence so that interbreeding of Neanderthals with modern humans could have been possible, and the DNA evidence at the time was certainly not complete. This skeletal evidence is not in modern populations in other parts of the world, only in Europeans, which is where Neanderthals lived. But he concludes that the preponderance of evidence shows it is highly unlikely that Neanderthals could have evolved directly into modern humans, as some were still speculating at the time the book was published.

There is a lot of detailed information packed into this book. There are also many illustrations. The author intended to give an overview of the evidence regarding Neanderthals, and it is based on a lot of research done by many scholars. He has deliberately skipped noting all the research and names in order to "present an unbroken and impersonalized account of the material under discussion" to make it more readable. In general I think that's fine, however I wish he had included a section of notes at the back of the book to show what the sources were. There is a bibliography, but extensive notes would have been useful. I also wished several times in the sections discussing human evolution that he had included a graphic tree showing the relationships between the various human species. There wasn't one in the book, and I wound up looking in Wikipedia more than once to see the tree. Overall, I learned a lot from this book, but I really want to know more about what has been discovered since the book was published.

I just finished the Great Courses Introduction to Paleontology presented by Stuart Sutherland 5*****, definitely one of the better of the typically quite good GC videos. Like most (though some can be longer and some shorter), this program consisted of 24 roughly half-hour segments, running therefore about twelve hours in all. It's a good way for me to make use of my time while I'm nebulizing at least twice daily for COPD, to watch a GC video on my desktop computer. I anticipate doing several GC series for the second quarter since GC has quite a number of programs on early Judaism and Christianity and classical history/philosophy/mythology.

There's also another GC video presented by Sutherland, A New History of Life, that looks quite good and that I'd like to get to when I have the time. It's a longer program, though, 36 half-hour sessions for a total of 18 hours. I'm obviously not going to get to it for this prehistory first quarter.

I finished my second book for this quarterly theme: Skara Brae by David Clarke. It is another publication by Historic Scotland that I bought when I visited the site in 2016. It is a really good book, albeit very short, that gives a concise overview of the site, of what life might have been there and the connections of the village to other neolithic places on the Orkney Islands and beyond.

>52 MissBrangwen: I find Skara Brae fascinating - difficult to find detailed books about it here though.