Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 30) Kindle Edition

I liked the book and found most reviews here to be overly negative. However, it is true that it would be good if the author had pursued the "Sapient Paradox" more fully. Renfrew does point out that the huge and accelerating advances by modern man, starting about 5-10 thousand years ago, made the ancient million year long history of primitive primates seem constant and stagnant. However, he does emphasize the unique nature of modern man who suddenly appeared 80-100 thousand years ago. Those unique individuals had the power of speech, an advanced pre-frontal cortex, and an extensive 25 year maturation and development of cognitive skills. And he shows how even during the first 50,000 years of modern man's existence as hunter gatherers there were minimal advances until about 10,000 years ago, when the agricultural and pastoral Ages led to the growth of settled communities in those few regions where the people took to such farming cultures.

The author explains in detail how modern man suddenly appeared in Africa about 100,000 years ago and was a markedly unique individual, vastly superior in cognitive abilities to the so-called pre-human primates. The missing link to those possible precursors has not yet been found. Some reviewers may be turned off by this emphasis because it is basically a critique of the strict evolutionary theories and leaves room for speculation whether some unknown agent contributed to this transformation that established for the first time a people almost identical to present-day humans. Renfrew does state that those people, moving out of Africa 70-80 thousand years ago, were anatomically almost identical to today's people. It is not the purpose of this book to answer how that all occurred, but it was the advanced biological structure of those people, primarily in their cognition, that allowed the rapid advances that eventually occurred after the Agricultural Age.

Renfrew also explains how the new settled communities led to expanding trade, the production of goods, and the need for negotiating and bargaining skills. Those individuals endowed with such skills would have prospered more than those without the mental ability to accumulate inventories of goods and bargain and trade with other people in an emerging "business class." The mental challenges that were faced by the production, storing, and trading activities would have created a divide in the population with the more successful having more children than the less successful. This led to a population of increasingly "sharp" people--individuals with the persistence to work, the mental agility to calculate, and a mind-set for long-term planning. Thus, the author seems to explain the sapient paradox by showing that modern man, after 50,000 or more years as a hunter gatherer, settled down to community lives, and the resulting challenges led, by simple genetic advances, to an explosion in the competencies of those communities enjoying new and expanding Agricultural and Trading activities. No mutations were needed; just the gradual genetic concentration of genes from the "winners."

In essence, "survival of the fittest" became a matter not of outwitting mother nature, wild animals, and cold weather, but of prospering in settled market oriented communities. No evolution in its broadest sense was involved, there were few adaptive mutations in that "brief" 50,000 years, but simple genetics, mate selection, and monogamy created an ever expanding population of individuals with the cognitive skills and behavioral traits needed for living in advanced social groups. Most notably, these early societies were in the Orient and the Middle East, with Assyria, Egypt, Judea, and Babylon thriving as huge civilizations about 5,000 years ago. History shows that such advances occurred in only parts of the world with other regions permanently mired in Stone Age cultures. He also omits any suggestion that such cognitive and social advances occurred primarily in societies that allowed a degree of economic freedom that would allow individual active participation by its population. Renfrew carefully avoids any such conclusions and simply argues that all people in the world today have equal cognitive capabilities. He is thus politically correct and avoids any attempt to explain why some societies advanced more than others and whether that had any effect on the nature of their people. However, in his defense, he had to rely on the DNA analysis of his times. The last 30 years have shown that the DNA of today's people around the world is much more varied than originally believed. Undoubtedly, DNA analysis still does not identify the individual traits that make an individual effective in today's technical and highly organized societies. It is possible that those subtle competencies, consistently enhanced in the genetics of advancing societies, could explain why some places skyrocketed ahead of other places.

The book does require a reader with some knowledge of the varying impact of culture, religion, and biology on the ebb and flow of historical civilizations. However, for those readers interested in exploring those types of riddles this is a great introduction. Renfrew does make it very clear that evolution has played a smaller role than simple genetics, and that it was cultural advances caused by agricultural, mechanical, and technological developments that created the ever-increasingly competent people who could work with such challenges. But he stops short of making conclusions which would violate today's multi-culturalists' dogma:.There was a dual force involved: successful farmers created storage facilities which established trading communities in which the people were motivated to develop new modes of transportation, which led the enterprising members who designed better boats to trade more distantly, which then created the need for laws to regulate business activity, and the use of money and banking, and so forth. Once this spiraling series of developments got rolling, many people in many areas of the world got left behind. Renfrew would have been accused of being a racist had he explored those ideas further.

Informative but not written with my layman's understanding in mind. I frequently had to read paragraphs several times to gain an understanding. Perhaps the author would do well to reflect on "eschew sesquipedalian obfuscation". I almost bailed out on reading this more than once.

This small book will stimulate your thinking whether you agree with it or not. I found it a great jumping-off point that aimed me toward more detailed texts and ideas, especially in sociology.

Renfrew's book proved once again that he is an excellent teacher of prehistory. I found his discussion of symbols was clear, something I had had difficulty grasping before as a rank layman. His example of the weight concept to illustrate the process of symbols is covered in a very understandable way. I would suggest that a familarity with an overall picture of prehistory might make this book more meaningful.

I had to order this book for a class and it was a good read. I usually don't expect class books to be engaging or easy to get through but this one did surpass my expectations. Anyone interested in prehistory should give it a whirl, you might be pleasantly surprised.

An excellent read. Very clear explanation of background before presenting his new proposals. Lots of synthesis of information that was very useful to non-specialists. My only complaint: the Kindle copy had no easy way to cite places in the text - page numbers would be great!

This is a comprehensive and authoritative presentation of human prehistory. Well written and highly entertaining. I learned a great deal. I recommend this book to anyone who is curious about the origins of human society.

Renfrew starts out by providing a good overview of the history of archeology as a science and explains the various techniques and technologies that have been developed to allow us to date artifacts from the distant past. Although some folks may find this tedious, it is important information that illustrates just how far we have come in a very short time from when the absence of writing marked an impenetrable curtain to understanding the past.

He goes on to discuss the separation between the biological evolution of humans and our technical and social development. It is well known that humans were biologically modern for hundreds of thousands of years before we began the cultural development that led us to become the creatures we are today. Renfrew calls this the "Sapient Paradox".

He introduces the concept of "Institutional Facts" and how people's engagement with the physical world leads to the creation of these facts. Money, for example, is a complex institutional fact that evolved from a recognition of physical facts such as weight and quantity combined with the simpler institutional fact of value. Cultures can decide that some things, such as gold, are desirable and have a value even though they have no practical utility. You cannot eat or drink gold; gold will not keep you warm on a cold night. Gold will not defend you against predators, enable you to kill prey, or help you dig for roots and tubers. Nevertheless, many cultures throughout the world have defined for themselves that gold has value. Quantize that gold into standard units and, Voila, you have a new, artificial and entirely abstract "fact" called money.

This is a remarkable insight and achievement. It could stand alone as one of the greatest theories on the development of human culture. But within this very insight lies Renfrew's fatal flaw. It has long been believed that this "cultural big bang" took place in ice age Europe, and it was the unfathomable immensity of that environment that was the spark for this revolutionary change.

Renfrew eschews the affect on the human mind that must have been wrought by living amongst, hunting, and being hunted by massive, deadly beasts every single day. He ignores how humans react to their environment and the impact that limitless tundra and continent spanning ice sheets must have had. He waves away the hauntingly beautiful, evocative, and technically flawless evidence of this painted on the walls of Lascaux, Chauvet, Trois Freres and many other sites. Instead, he adopts the currently popular PC approach of pushing back this incredible transition in human thinking to put it in Africa more than 50,000 years earlier, pointing to a few sea shells and bits of red ochre from Blombos cave.

Something sparked a sea-change in the human mind that caused our ancestors to veer sharply from the course of behavior they had followed for hundreds of thousands of years. Renfrew is certainly right that some influence from the physical world must have caused this to happen. But he is certainly wrong that it started with a people beach-combing for clams and turtles, and grubbing for termites.