Well, not exactly, but I very like prose about prehistoric times, stone age, mammoth hunting, expeditions into the ice, shamanism, fighting against the first iron age people, etc. Among my favourite are: "Rulaman" by David Friedrich Weinland (written in 1876) "Mammoth hunters" and "Village by the lake" by S. Pokrovskis (1971) as well as the "West of Eden" series by Harry Harrison (although it's more sci-fi, but it has stone age people and I like those books very much). And although I much enjoy these books, I'd like to read something more recent, maybe because we now have more knowledge about the neolithic and other stone age period people. I don't need a science book, but prose where the setting is those times. Something about the first mother cities and civilizations would also be appreciated. Any suggestions?
I hope you've read the Earth's Children series by Jean Auel, starting with Clan of the Cave Bear. It's about Europe in the declining years of the last big ice age, around 25,000BCE, when Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis were migrating into the same territories and began to interact with each other--or not. Talk about Neolithic, she went off into the Alaska wilderness and lived through the winter by her wits with only Mesolithic technology, to understand how the people would have felt about the universe. She adds some nice touches. There was no place in the Neanderthal skull for a speech center, and the Neanderthal facial musculature wasn't quite up to the job anyway. So her Neanderthals have a very sophisticated sign language. The first book was not as well received as it should have been, in my opinion. I think neither critics nor the public knew quite what to make of it. We loyal fans have stuck with the four sequels and are waiting for the last in the series, but it hasn't picked up fans along the way like Harry Potter. Which I also love, I mean no disparagement, I just don't understand taste. The movie didn't help. I only watched a bit of it but I could see the problem was that it was faithful to the story. The Neanderthals were speaking in sign language and Americans just hate movies with subtitles because we watch them on TV and they're either too small to read or so big they cover the action. You might also try Michener. He has a habit of starting some of his novels so far in the past that you get some long chapters on the Neolithic ancestors of the characters, or even so far back that humans haven't come on the scene yet. I'm thinking of Hawaii, which has a very long and very nice treatment of Polynesian culture before being overrun by civilization, and The Source, which is about the region around Israel and goes far back into the Stone Age before there were any Jews or Arabs. I believe Centennial, which is about the American West, also has many pages about the Neolithic cultures that thrived here prior to the European occupation. You might find yourself so engaged by the stories as they're set in an era you've learned to appreciate, that you're happy to follow them through the discovery of agriculture and the permanent settlements of the Neolithic Era into the age of civilization. If you don't want to limit yourself to the Mesopotamian First Civilization, from which our Greco-Roman is descended, you might want to explore what's available in translation from the descendants of the other First Civilizations. I'm sure there are lots of good books in Hindi about ancient India and in Chinese about ancient China. Unfortunately half of the first civilizations were obliterated by Christian racist vandals (Aztec, Inca) and Muslim racist vandals (Egypt). Fortunately Egypt had a chance to become well known before Caliph Omar's troops destroyed it so there are plenty of good stories from that era that have survived. The civilizations of the Western Hemisphere never had that chance, but there have been some fanciful novels written based upon what little we managed to learn about them.
I haven't, so thanks for the suggestion! And others as well Latest research proves otherwise, but Neanderthals would have had more high pitch voices. This is why I want a more up to date prose. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I might just go search out these books tomorrow. Do you know what happened to the North American First Civilizations? And who were they? AmishRakeFight
Not sure about North American (Mayan and Olmec can be said to be partially NA, right?), but I find Peru and Central America a lot more interesting in this aspect. Especially Peru. And especially the mother city of Caral, which to my mind is one of the most significant archeological discoveries in centuries. My knowledge about ancient american civilizations is quite patchy with good knowledge in what I find interesting and almost no knowledge in what I don't. Prehistory is a hobby and is a part of my research in world mythologies, so there's lots of ground to cover all over the world, but I'm sure I'll once get to a more serious research in american civilizations to get a more complete picture.
Earth's Children is a very good and readable series... although by the fourth book I started to wish the main characters would leave each other alone for long enough to look for a faster means of transportation Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!. The author sometimes takes a lot of time describing the scenery and local flora and it doesn't really move the story along. "Centennial ... has many pages"!
Well yeah, somewhere around a thousand like a lot of his work. I like a good long book. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Apparently so do a lot of other people. These children who are wading through 500 pages of Harry Potter won't be daunted by 1,000-page books when they're adults.
Has anyone tried the Wilbur Smith Egyptian novels : River God, The Seventh Scroll, Warlock; its the story of an eunuch in ancient Egypt at the time of the Pharoahs. I found them pretty colorful and intriguing.
I have friends who can't put them down, but I've never tried them myself. I don't think he goes as far back as mammoths, though Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Today I got my hands on "The clan of the cave bear", first book from the "Earth's Children" series, will see how it reads, can't promise a quick review though, because I'm simultaneously reading another serious book (Joseph Campbell "The Masks of God - Oriental Mythology")
