Customer Reviews

The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age

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By bringing together evidence from archaeology, ancient history, linguistics and anthropology, the author convincingly demonstrates that the inventions, achievements and discoveries of prehistoric times have all but been edited out of popular accounts of human history. He describes how stone age explorers discovered all the world's land masses, presents strong evidence for writing before 5000BC and for mathematical, medical and astronomical science as well as tool-making and mining long before the Sumerians. Tracing the human story from the cusp of history back to the earliest known artefacts, he shows that the making of rugs, dental drilling and accountancy among others, were all known in the Neolithic. But not only that - the other "ideological wall" placed at about 40 000BC is also being shown up to be highly dubious as many anomalous cases of earlier symbolic and artistic activities are coming to light. I found the section on language of particular interest and would like to refer interested readers to the work of linguists like Dr. Joseph Greenberg (Language In The Americas, Indo-European and its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family), Merritt Ruhlen (On The Origin Of Languages: Studies In Linguistic Taxonomy), Alan Bomhard (Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis ) and Sydney M. Lamb (Sprung From Some Common Source), all available here on amazon.com. Lost Civilisations Of The Stone Age is lavishly illustrated with figures, plates and a map of language families, and there's an extensive bibliography and index. A well-researched, well-written book that sometimes perhaps goes into too much technical detail for the casual reader, but always remains thought-provoking.

The best thing you can say about any book is that it seemed worth the time taken to read it. This book passes the test. It told me things about the early use of symbols that I did not know, and told me them in a readable and decently illustrated way (after a slightly pedantic introduction - don't let it put you off). It also achieves its main aim: to prove for those who ever doubted it that the pre-"civilised" world was sometimes capable of accumulating significant bodies of thought and methodology in writing, counting, medical procedures, etc. So far as I know, however, this is not in itself a controversial idea (unlike, for example, a discussion of why pre-"civilised" communities sometimes accumulate pools of ignorance and malevolence...). Irritatingly, the author presents it as such throughout his chapters. Although there is lots of new evidence described here, so far as I can remember the thrust of this book had ceased being controversial by the time I was an undergraduate studying archaeology in Cambridge in the early 1980s! (There was something almost spooky about seeing these old chestnuts presented as millennial thought.) For sure, not everyone will agree with his interpretations of the evidence, but his only truly controversial moments are in deciding what constitutes "writing" and "civilisation". This kind of semantic controversy can be useful, but it needs to be much more clearly defined and argued than is the case in this book. None of this is an argument against buying the book however, as in his useful tour of the evidence the writer gives quite enough qualifications and detail for the reader to make his/her own mind up about the date, likelihood and possible importance of "writing" and other achievements of civilisation in "prehistoric" cultures. Above all, this reader reached the last page...

In her survey work "Plato Prehistorian" Mary Settegast briefly discusses Paleolithic runes, apparently an alphabet, which shares signs with the much later Indus Valley script, western Greek, and Runic or Baltic writing. Barry Fell studied the medieval sources which preserve the many kinds of Ogham writing, which is a sort of line writing on either side of a baseline, and concluded that its basis in groups of five or less indicated an origin in a sort of finger spelling. This presupposes the use of an alphabet. We no longer use Ogham, and the alphabet we use today isn't like this runic system. The daunting part of this tidbit is that alphabetic writing must be at least 12,000 years old, nearly three times as old as the known systems of hieroglyphics and cuneiform, and probably 35,000 years old, with no good reason to believe that it isn't much older than that.

Naturally I wanted to check the Rudgley book to see if Settegast is mentioned. She isn't. Rudgley covers some of the same ground, but his entire book pertains to the literacy of supposedly preliterate cultures.

The Upper Paleolithic character set suggests that some form of writing, perhaps even alphabetic writing, has been part of human activity for over 12,000 years. This isn't to say that we'll someday find a library, but at least if we do we won't be caught unawares. There's a discussion of Linear A, and (page 75) there's a quote from Allan Forbes and Thomas Crowder, source of the Magdalenian character set reproduced by Mary Settegast.

Rudgley discusses that the conventional view that writing is relatively recent is really an outgrowth of the idea of progress, by which is meant that humans were stupid primitive cave people for hundreds of thousands of years after they descended from the trees until, in short order, they domesticated animals, perfected irrigation and plant breeding, built the first cities, and invented writing.

Rudgley makes the point (pp 67-68) that Vinca signs were first believed to be derivative of earlier Sumerian, then were derided as random marks after their actual age was discovered. Considering that the Sumerians' best known cities as well as the Tigris and Euphrates bore names that were pre-Sumerian, it shouldn't come as any surprise that someone accomplished something long before they entered the region.

As Settegast points out, sealevel was hundreds of feet lower, so "ice age" settlements and perhaps thousands of years of cultural developments have long since vanished. It used to be thought that writing originated in three or four places and diffused outward into the world. Its invention was too recent to have any impact on the Americas, or so it was thought, because the Americas were completely isolated prior to that.

Perhaps most interesting (pp 247-260) is Rudgley's discussion of the dates of artifacts from Japan, a situation which has relevance in the current debate over Clovis-first-and-only.

Also of interest is "The Origin of Language" by Merritt Ruhlen

I found many of the insights in this books valuable. Rudgeley does a good job of compiling some information about the stone age into a nice, easily accessible form. He also is successful in showing the fairly obvious idea that "civilization" did not spring forth fully formed like Athena from the forehead of the first Sumerian kings.

However, Rudgeley does so in a style that is uncomfortably Revisionist and misrepresentative. He wastes no time: in the introduction he presents the fallacious idea that fringe books about Atlantis or aliens are mainstream while the widely accepted theories of Marija Gimbutas are fringe. He furthers his misrepresentation by trumping other highly suspect subjects such as Nostratic and others and holding them out like foregone solutions to all the problems if anthropology. His constant attempts to belittle "the mainstream" academic opinion are seriously weakened by his reliance on unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable theories as well as his strange affectation for using ideas that have been mainstream for decades and making them seem new and refreshing seriously mar his ability to present the (admittedly) good ideas the book does possess.

Richard Rudgley's The Lost Civilations of the Stone Age brings up some very interesting ideas and delves into news ways of looking at the prehistoric past. It is important to view the stone age peoples with more open minds than is usually done and this book could be a good place to begin that examination. The only serious flaw of this book, and it sometimes could be quite grating, was the author's insistence on building up his case by dramatically overemphasing the importance and achievements of these ancestors of ours. Any evidence, however spurious, was included. It felt, at times, that the author felt that unless he proved that the stone age peoples were, in fact, superior to all other peoples that followed he had not fulfilled his mission. The book became a competition instead of simply a way of presenting the facts of the stone age and allowing their own achievements to stand. It was an interesting read, although at times it could be quite frustrating.

I agree with several other reviewers -- this admirable and much-needed overview of archaeological data pertaining to stone age culture is undermined on every page by a deeply-misguided thesis.

Rudgley's premise is that the academic world regards stone age hominids through a theoretical lens that holds them as "savage" and therefore incapable of generating culture in any meaningful sense. The development of civilization in Mesopotamia rescued us from the darkness of benighted ignorance and enabled man to create writing, math, civil society, art, and the other great lights of creative endeavor. This prejudice, Rudgely argues, prevents archaeologists and historians from grasping the significance of stone age artifacts that provide evidence of importance precursors to these tropes of civilized culture. He surveys a number of significant findings and examines the possibility that glyphs on walls could serve as early symbolic communication, that clay tokens were employed in primitive accounting systems, that ritual mutilation and trepanation were rudimentary forms of medicine, and so forth.

His survey and analysis of a wide range of evidence is so useful and balanced in tone that it is almost as if there are two Rudgleys: the one who did close analysis of available data, and the one who wrote a misguided polemic against the deficits of our prejudiced views.

As many readers both amateur and professional have cogently called out, the putative target of Rudgley's critique is a straw man caricature who would be regarded as a fringe lunatic within the academy. His scornful references to the alleged "common perspective" far outnumber his actual examples of such prejudice, leaving Rudgley looking like the zealot here.

This point has been covered so thoroughly by other reviewers that I will add only one point to this argument. Given that all the evidence and analysis that Rudgley presents in this book was conducted by other researchers, every single example he offers as criticism of the "prevailing view" is in fact counter-evidence to his own thesis. He demonstrates in painstaking detail that dozens of mainstream archaeologists have produced and considered evidence challenging what he takes to be dogma. Where does that leave his vitriol?

In the context of his other books I suppose that the real fuel for his ire is ideologically motivated by what I take to be his personal vision that a neo-archaic form of consciousness is emerging in modern times to counterbalance the excesses of a hierarchical forms of social control, inherited from the early Levant, that subjugates the majority of its citizenry, alienates the spirit from the creative powers of the earth, and threatens the life of the planet.

Whatever the merits of such a theory on its own terms, the vehemence of his vision distorts this book. It could easily have been a masterpiece of popular science writing. Even in its present state it is a valuable overview of the evidence of early culture in the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods, made tedious by vendetta.

Due to it's alluring title, people who buy this book might be expecting a slightly more finely researched version of Hancock or Van Donnikan. Thankfully, this is not the case, and Rudgley seems to be a more down to earth, logical, and unbiased student of archeology. In fact, this book seems to be as much a refutation of the ideas of ambitious enterprising "fringers" as it is a criticism of the more xenophobic of the ultra-conservative mainstreamers.
In truth, despite the spectacular title, most of Rudgley's ideas fall well into the boundaries of mainstream scientific thought, albeit they meander very close to the edge.
You will find no Aliens, dubious "High-Technology", Atlantis or Mu within the body, though in the preface the author does take a moment to mention these aspects of so-called "fringe" archeology. It seems that fringe archeology is often given ammunition by archeologists who fail to provide context or precurse for the beginnings of certain cultural upheavals in prehistoric times, implying that a certain technology or practice "comes out of nowhere," like the Aurignacion industries of 40,000 ybp or the sudden Nelolithic explosion of 12000 ybp, for instance.
The truth is that context and precurser of Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Mesolithic industries stretch far back into antiquity. Anyone who has kept up on the day to day of archeological finds in the news over the past few years and is both open minded and possessed of a fair amount of common sense will already realize this, and will have already read about many of the finds contained herein. In fact, the info is slightly out of date as many more lithics have been found since the publication, all of which support Rudgley's opinion.
The beauty of the book is not in it's revelations but in it's detail, as many facts about anomolies and other evidences are examined in full.
For the sake of instance, most up to date readers will already know that there were calendars and signs that may have led up to writing, or that elaborate burials were done in the Middle Paleolithic, or that art extends even to the lower paleolithic. Though Rudgley often presents these as surprising and groundbreaking, he makes up for it by giving the finds detail and context, and also makes the information valuable by compiling it and indexing it skillfully.
His massive accumulated info on mining in the Neolithic and Paleolithic is the most exciting part of the research, as this aspect of archeology is often not well-documented in popular periodicals. The same can be said of the info he presents for music and complex musical instruments dating even into the Mousterian period.
I would recommend this book as a feference for those writing about or studying prehistory, but I would caution that it is often written in text-book style with exhaustive commentary, and that most of the info presented, though correct, is no longer controversial.
Rudgley does not make a claim for agriculture before the neolithic, or at least before the Natufians, indicating that he didn't know of the domesticated taro found on scrapers in the Solomon Isles from 28,000 ybp.
He makes no claim for animal domestication before the usual accepted timeframe, showing his lack of knowledge of 18,000 ybp dogs in Siberia and 32,000 ybp dogs in Belgium. And though he cites Paul Bahn extensively throughout the book, there is no mention of Bahn's convincing evidence for horse domestication in the Upper Paleolithic. Neither, it seems, did Rudgely anticipate the recent redating for the invention of the bow and arrow at 75,000 ybp...although the existence of "arrow straighteners" and small solutrean arrow heads should have made this a matter of common sense and circumstancial evidence.
In relaying the circumstancial evidence that man had boats before the Upper Paleolithic the author is thorough, allowing the gem of Sicily's earliest inhabitation, which is often forgotten in light of the more sensational immigrations to Australia and Flores. But Rudgley's single truly conyroversial speculation is his idea that America may have been populated first by Homo Erectus. He presents a decent case for this, but I'm gonna have to withhold judgement on that one.

Read it and think! That's what this book is about. Forget about reviews by people who quibble with technical issues that are the subject of debates in professional archaeology. This book (like Guns, Germs and Steel-Buy it!) takes the reader on an exploration of one perception of how and when civilization came into being. It is outstanding in its depth and breadth, and allows the reader to come to his or her own conclusions. No one knows what really happened and we probably never will, but Rudgely sure gives us information to ponder.

Rudgley's book is fine until it, without real justification or analysis, adopts the premise that vaious markings found amongst archaeological sites in Europe predating 3500BC constitute writing. No indepth analysis is propounded to support this. The contention is simply not justified in the way it needs to be, and the practice is very disappointing for a purportedly good book on the subject of stone age cultures. For me, Rudgley's credibility was undermined at this point. Surely we can appreciate the sophistication of stone age cultures, in any case, without having to believe that they had writing? To rely so strongly on that contention for his argument that stone age cultures deserve more respect and recognition than they have received is to, unfortunately, risk weakening it in my view.

If you are looking for astounding proof of the ancient (but non-existent) Cimmerians, fabled Atlantis, or even, perhaps, irrefutable evidence that Human civilization was begun by aliens from other planets, I'd suggest you buy the latest edition of the National Enquirer. You won't find these topics in "The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age," by Richard Rudgley. In fact, in some respects the title of the book is somewhat misleading, because -- other than, perhaps, a very Old World European society which predates the arrival of "proto-Europeans," there really are no "lost" civilizations discussed in this book.

What is discussed, however, is the found evidence of past Human culture. Rudgley conducts a fascinating survey of what our most ancient ancestors were doing with all that time they had on their hands, including inventing language, making a beginning at written symbolism, domesticating fire, developing pottery, and, apparently, smoking a whole lot of marijuana. The author's main point is that the origins of much human behavior, technology, art and culture that contemporary archeologists and paleo-anthropologists suggest developed no earlier than just ten thousand or so years ago is actually the result of a long period of usage and development, dating to as early as the lower paleolithic period, i.e., the time of Homo Erectus, before even Neanderthals roamed the Earth.

Rudgley considers archeological artifacts from around the world in building his case that Human culture is much older than generally ascribed, and, in the final analysis, it is not only a persuasive argument, but consonant with common sense. Chapters on early art, fire, written symbols, and the development of language are particularly fascinating.

An added bonus with this book is not just the fascinating material, but it is also guaranteed to help the insomniac find relief. This is not necessarily a rap on the author or the content, though, because you will want to pick it up again next evening to read more, before falling into dreams of life as a caveman. (Or cavewoman.)

If you, like me, are curious about what life was like for our earliest ancestors, where we came from, how we got here, and the events which preceded written history, I think you will enjoy this book. I did.