Book summary “Prehistoric Men”: summary

Introduction

You often look back at the origins of human society and wonder how early humans transitioned from simple cave dwellers to modern civilization. The vast expanse of prehistory feels obscure, leaving you with questions about how archaeologists uncover ancient secrets without written records.

Robert J. Braidwood solves this problem by tracing the complete arc of human prehistory through material remains. The central idea is that human history spans from early food-gathering cave dwellers to settled village-farming communities and complex civilizations driven by the agricultural revolution. You discover how physical evolution, tool traditions, and environmental changes shaped early human culture.

The book is structured into five main stages to guide your understanding.

• How do archaeologists use material traces and stratifications to reconstruct human activity?
• How did human physical and cultural evolution unfold across glacial shifts?
• What do early stone tool traditions and intentional burials reveal about human culture?
• How did post-glacial adaptations and nuclear area cultivation launch the agricultural revolution?
• How did permanent farming villages lay the structural groundwork for civilization?

1. How We Learn About Prehistoric Men

Archeology furnishes a history of human activity by finding material traces and interpreting them to tell a story. You must look for artifacts, living places, and graves that survived the destruction of time because most soft or breakable objects decayed.

Archeology reconstructs human activity by interpreting material traces and stratifications.

Finding a rusty spark plug in a dump yard allows someone to deduce that it belongs to an automobile motor and must date within the last sixty years. Heinrich Schliemann proved that ancient city mounds are stratified like cake layers, providing a chronological framework where lower layers are oldest. He used his fortune from merchant activities and the 1849 California gold rush to test his idea that ancient cities were real. By digging mounds in Turkey and Greece, he demonstrated that towns were built one above another after previous settlements were destroyed.

Schliemann excavated ancient Troy, where the first city had at least nine layers above it, and Homeric Troy was later identified as layer VIIa. Similar stacking occurs across the ancient world, such as the 15 layers found in a Syrian mound dug by the author, and the 11 layers or sub-layers counted in total at Troy.

Radioactive carbon testing of organic remains provides scientific dates for prehistoric sites, though statistical ranges and potential contamination require cautious interpretation. Atomic scientists test the radioactivity remaining in materials like charcoal, wood, shell, or mummy hair to date archeological sites. Statistical probabilities mean that a given date has a two-in-three chance of falling within a plus or minus range, requiring consistent determinations across multiple sites to build confidence.

The date for the Jarmo village given as 6750 plus or minus 200 B.C. means there are two chances in three that the real date fell between 6950 and 6550 B.C.

2. The Changing World and Prehistoric Men Themselves

Human physical and cultural evolution unfolded across Pleistocene glacial shifts and diverse fossil lineages.

During the Pleistocene period, or Ice Age, massive glaciers thousands of feet thick covered parts of northern North America and Europe. These glaciers locked up water and lowered ocean levels to expose dry land bridges. These glacial phases alternated with warmer interglacial periods.

When the front of a glacier stood at Milwaukee, the weather was bitterly cold in Chicago. The last great glacier melted away less than 10,000 years ago.

Human evolution depended on the coordinated development of an upright posture, increasing brain size, specialized thumbs and hands, and the use of tools. Proper human ancestors required upright standing and walking. The growth of flexible hands with opposable thumbs, a brain capable of understanding cause and effect, and tool use all evolved together in a mutually reinforcing process.

Fossil discoveries across the Old World reveal diverse early human types, including Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus, and Neanderthals, leading up to modern humans. Early human forms possessed thick skulls, heavy brow ridges, and smaller brains than modern humans. In western Europe, isolated populations during the last glaciation developed into classic Neanderthalers, while other regions saw different regional evolutionary paths.

Eugene Dubois discovered the first Java man bones in 1891-1892. A.T. Marston found fossil human skull fragments at Swanscombe in 1935. Java man had 4 skulls, 4 jaws, and some odd teeth and thigh bones, and stood 5 feet 6 inches tall. Neanderthal men stood 5 feet 3 inches tall, and classic Neanderthalers in Europe date from 85,000 to 40,000 years ago. Other groups included Meganthropus, Sinanthropus, and pre-neanderthaloids.

Chemical tests proved that the Piltdown and Galley Hill finds were fakes, dismantling the theory of a very early separate modern human lineage. British scientists used chemical tests in the 1948-1949 period to prove that Piltdown man and associated tools were an elaborate fake. This eliminated the evidence supporting the old theory that modern humans evolved along a separate, very early line parallel to Neanderthals.

Eoanthropus dawsoni was exposed as a fabricated fossil after chemical testing. Later groups included Cro-Magnon, Combe Capelle-Brünn, and populations at Mount Carmel that showed 70 per cent modern features.

3. Cultural Beginnings and Cave Layers

Culture lives in the minds of a group rather than in your genes. A day-old Hungarian baby adopted by a family in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, will grow up with no more idea of Hungarian culture than anyone else in Oshkosh.

Early stone tool traditions, cave stratifications, and intentional burials reveal the foundations of human culture.

Tool-making advanced through three distinct steps:

• simple utilization of found objects;
• haphazard fashioning when needed;
• standardization according to established traditions.

Glaciers acted like giant bulldozers during the Ice Age. They destroyed ancient camp sites and mixed stone tools from different millennia into secondary geological deposits.

Earliest prehistoric tool manufacture is categorized into four primary traditions:

• pebble tools;
• core-bifaces;
• flake tools;
• chopper-chopping tools.

Father Maringer reported an early group of tools in Japan resembling those of Java, called Patjitanian. Minimum age of the earliest pebble tools found in Africa reaches 500,000 years old.

The old parallel phyla theory erroneously claimed that specific human physical lines made exclusively specific stone tools. In 1906, M. Victor Commont found a workshop site on a terrace above the Somme river in France where flake tools clearly appeared in direct association with core-biface tools.

Excavations at the Peking man cave revealed the use of fire, chopper-tradition stone tools, and clear evidence of cannibalism. Seventy per cent of the animals Peking man killed were fallow deer.

Caves preserve stratified layers of human debris over millennia. Classic Neanderthal groups lived in caves from 75,000 to 45,000 years ago.

Advanced cave layers feature sophisticated flake industries like the Levalloisian and Mousterian. In the cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine, out of 9,784 flint tools found in the same level as pre-neanderthaloid skulls, only three were core-bifaces and the rest were flakes or chips.

Intentional burials discovered in cave floors indicate that early prehistoric humans practiced mortuary rituals and possessed early notions of an afterlife.

4. Early Moderns and the Food-Producing Revolution

Blade technology, post-glacial adaptations, and nuclear area cultivation launched the agricultural revolution.

The appearance of the blade-tool tradition around 40,000 years ago marked a major shift in stone-working technology, relying on specialized conical cores and punch-and-hammer techniques. Unlike older flake tools, blades are long, parallel-sided flakes made primarily from flint or obsidian. Crafting them required a well-supported blade-core and precise strikes using a hammer stone against a bone or antler punch, demanding a high level of technical know-how. The oldest blade tools were discovered deep in the Mount Carmel caves at Tabun Eb and Ea within a late Acheulean industry.

Blade technology enabled the creation of a wide variety of specialized tools designed for specific functional tasks rather than general use. Toolmakers developed specific forms such as:

• backed blades to protect fingers;
• transverse-edged burins for engraving and carving wood or bone;
• tanged points for spear or arrow tips;
• notched blades for shaft preparation;
• awls for boring holes;
• end-scrapers.

Solutrean industries in western Europe produced finely worked laurel leaf and willow leaf points, which served as daggers or projectile tips. As the Upper Paleolithic progressed, materials like bone and antler became increasingly important for crafting advanced implements and weapons. Humans manufactured needles with eyes, fish-hooks, split-based bone points, spear-throwers, thong-stroppers, and barbed antler harpoons, demonstrating an expanded capability to exploit various environmental resources. Split-based bone points and antler spear-throwers, which increased throwing power using the lever principle, were widely used in western Europe.

Late Pleistocene humans in western Europe developed sophisticated artistic traditions encompassing both movable carvings and dramatic cave paintings. Movable art included decorated tools and pregnant Venus figurines symbolizing fertility. Cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain depicted large cold-weather animals deep underground, created through an intense act of painting rather than for passive viewing. The Venus figurine from Willendorf and the deep cave paintings in Franco-Cantabrian sites illustrate this rich artistic output.

Microliths served as a key technological marker of the terminal Ice Age and post-glacial adaptations, consisting of tiny geometric blades mounted into shafts. People chipped slender miniature blades and formed them into tiny triangles, lunates, and trapezoids. Set in rows along wood or bone points, they functioned as efficient barbed harpoons or arrowheads designed to cause maximum bleeding in fast-moving prey. Historic Egyptians used trapezoidal microliths fastened broad end out on arrow shafts to hunt swift animals like the gazelle.

The Maglemosian culture represents a highly successful post-glacial forest adaptation in northern Europe, preserved exceptionally well in bogs. Finds from the great Danish peat-swamp at Maglemose provide a complete picture of these Forest folk summer camp remains, dating around 6,000 B.C. The assemblage includes stone axes for clearing new forests, bone and antler tools, wooden paddles, sled runners, fish-nets from plant fibers, and domesticated dogs.

The transition from food-gathering to effective food-production through the domestication of plants and animals revolutionized human life.

Marking a transformation as profound as the Industrial Revolution, humans in western Asia began producing their own food around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. An older environmental theory posited that desiccation caused by retreating glaciers forced humans, plants, and animals to cluster near rivers and oases. Robert J. Braidwood included a geologist, a botanist, and a zoologist on his expedition staff in Iraq in 1954-1955 to study environmental factors. Archaeological finds do not support the old theory, and meteorologists agree weather pattern changes were not that simple.

Braidwood classifies cultural evolution using technological and economic stages, which are further divided into shorter eras and sub-eras. Effective food-production could only start independently within nuclear areas, which are natural environments containing a diverse constellation of wild plants and animals ready for domestication. Western Asia served as the nuclear area for western cultural traditions, located in the hilly flanks above the arid Tigris-Euphrates basin. The hilly-flanks zone surrounding the drainage basin of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers sits at elevations of 2,000 to 5,000 feet and receives 10 to 20 or more inches of annual winter rainfall.

The Natufian assemblage, found in Palestinian cave upper layers and open-air sites, represents a transitional material culture featuring microliths, sickle blades, and early bone tools. Natufian folk lived in the open mouth of a large rock-shelter and terrace on Mount Carmel, cutting basin-shaped depressions into the rocky floor. Karim Shahir is a temporary open-air encampment site in the Kurdish hill-country of northeastern Iraq showing early features of the incipient domestication era. Dr. Bruce Howe excavated Karim Shahir in 1950-1951, M'lefaat was located in 1954-1955, and Dr. Ralph Solecki located Zawi Chemi Shanidar in 1956.

5. Village Farming and the Conquest of Civilization

Permanent farming villages in the hilly flanks laid the structural groundwork for urbanization, writing, and civilization in river valleys.

Food-collectors lived in small mobile bands constrained by ephemeral food sources. Food-producers stored meat on the hoof and grain in silos or jars, built permanent houses, grew populations, and developed specialized full-time crafts and new social rules. Food production began in southwestern Asia about 9000 years ago.

Jarmo, Iraq, showed about four acres of top bluff settlement with twenty houses and an estimated population of 150 people. The site features twenty-seven feet of depth, twelve layers of architectural changes, puddled mud walls built in courses, and an assemblage that eventually included portable pottery in its final third and obsidian tools traded from over three hundred miles away. Radiocarbon determinations place the average reasonable date for Jarmo at 6750 B.C. plus or minus 200.

Following Jarmo, the Hassuna assemblage in upper Mesopotamia displayed advanced pottery techniques, such as the Samarran style, while losing older chipped stone tool traditions. Radiocarbon determinations for Hassunan contexts range between 5100 and 5600 B.C. plus or minus 250.

The village-farming way of life gradually spread from the Near Eastern nuclear area into the Nile Valley and deep into Africa over thousands of years. The new economy moved down the Nile through the Fayum grain bins, Merimde village, and eventually reached Shaheinab near Khartoum in the Sudan, taking roughly fifteen hundred to three thousand years to propagate across these distances. Radiocarbon dates for Fayum materials are 4275 B.C. plus or minus 320, while Shaheinab dates average 3300 B.C. plus or minus 400 over a distance of 1500 miles.

Civilization is defined by urbanization, formal political structures, laws, public works, different art forms, a new moral order, and writing. Food-production is an absolute prerequisite for civilization, though food-producing populations are not necessarily civilized. When white men arrived in America, most Indians were food-producers growing corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and squash, but only the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas were civilized.

Civilizations first emerged in the rainless river lands of Egypt and Mesopotamia rather than the hilly-flanks zone because river control required cooperative human organization. In the hilly flanks, people farmed easily with rainfall and natural streams as individuals. In contrast, Egypt and Mesopotamia lacked rain and required massive collaborative labor to build and maintain dikes, reservoirs, canals, and ditches, which forced the creation of hard and fast rules and governance.

The Proto-Literate phase in Mesopotamia manifests full civilization through monumental architecture, advanced art, and the invention of writing. German excavators estimated that constructing a single Proto-Literate temple complex at Warka required 1,500 men working ten-hour days for five years.

Human history is divided into three major acts based on economic modes:

• The Food-Gatherers: 99 per cent of human history spent in the first act with 1 per cent left for historians;
• The Food-Producers: plant and animal domestication beginning 10,000 years ago;
• The Industrialization: modern economic mode moving at a terrific pace.

Modern foraging groups like Eskimos, native Australians, and Amazon jungle tribes continue living in the first act.

10 Key Ideas

1. Archeology reconstructs human activity by interpreting material traces and stratifications found in ancient city mounds and scientific carbon testing.
2. Human physical and cultural evolution unfolded across Pleistocene glacial shifts and diverse fossil lineages through the coordinated development of upright posture, tool use, and increasing brain size.
3. Early stone tool traditions, cave stratifications, and intentional burials reveal the foundations of human culture, moving from simple utilization to standardized stone-working traditions and mortuary rituals.
4. Caves preserve stratified layers of human debris over millennia, documenting the transition from classic Neanderthal groups to advanced flake industries and early burial practices.
5. Blade technology, post-glacial adaptations, and complex tool-making innovations enabled late Pleistocene humans to develop specialized tools, rich artistic traditions, and efficient post-glacial forest adaptations like the Maglemosian culture.
6. The transition from food-gathering to effective food-production through the domestication of plants and animals revolutionized human life by moving away from nomadic bands to settled economies.
7. Effective food-production could only start independently within nuclear areas like the hilly-flanks zone surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which contained a diverse constellation of wild plants and animals ready for domestication.
8. Permanent farming villages in the hilly flanks, such as the four-acre settlement at Jarmo, laid the structural groundwork for urbanization, writing, and civilization.
9. Civilizations first emerged in the rainless river lands of Egypt and Mesopotamia rather than the hilly-flanks zone because controlling river waters required massive cooperative human organization and governance.
10. Human history is divided into three major acts based on economic modes, with ninety-nine percent of human history spent as food-gatherers before transitioning to food-producers and modern industrialization.