STEVEN MITHEN

As an archaeologist, Steven Mithen has worked on the Hebridean island of Islay over a period of many years. In this book he introduces the sites and monuments and tells the story of the islands people from the earliest stone age hunter-gatherers to those who lived in townships and in the grandeur of Islay House. He visits the tombs of Neolithic farmers, forts of Iron Age chiefs and castles of medieval warlords, discovers where Bronze Age gold was found, treacherous plots were made against the Scottish crown, and explores the island of today, which was forged more recently by those who mined for lead, grew flax, fished for herring and distilled whisky the industry for which the island is best known today. Although an island history, this is far from an insular story: Islay has always been at a cultural crossroads, receiving a constant influx of new people and new ideas, making it a microcosm for the story of Scotland, Britain and beyond.

Steven Mithens unique history of water and society in the ancient world has never been told before and is particularly relevant today in the face of global climate change.The planet faces a 21st-century global water crisis - but to what extent is this really new? Past societies and ancient civilisations have always faced climate change and been dependent on their ability to harness and manage a water supply. This has often been a key driver of historical change, leading to some of the most remarkable engineering projects of antiquity.In THIRST, renowned archaeologist and prehistorian Steven Mithen examines the history of water management in the ancient world. From the first flushing toilets at Knossos on Minoan Crete to the aqueducts of Petra and the Incas, from the bath houses of Rome to the canals of ancient China and the vast reservoirs of the Khmer and Maya civilisations, water management is shown to have been not only essential for human survival but a source of political power. It will remain so as we face global climate change, population growth and mega-urbanisation on a massive scale. So, does the past give us reason for hope or for despair?

A fantastic voyage through 15,000 years of history that laid the foundations for civilisation as we know it by award-winning science writer Steven Mithen.Twenty thousand years ago Earth was in the midst of an ice age. Then global warming arrived, leading to massive floods, the spread of forests and the retreat of the deserts. By 5,000 BC a radically different human world had appeared. In place of hunters and gatherers there were farmers; in place of transient campsites there were towns. The foundations of our modern world had been laid and nothing that came after - the Industrial Revolution, the atomic age, the internet - have ever matched the significance of those events. AFTER THE ICE tells the story of climate changes impact during this momentous period - one that also saw the colonisation of the Americas and mass extinctions of animals throughout the world. Drawing on the latest cutting-edge research in archaeology, cognitive science, palaeontology, geology and the evolutionary sciences, Steven Mithen creates an evocative, original and remarkably complete picture of minds, cultures, lives and landscapes through 15,000 years of history.

A fascinating and incisive examination of our language instinct from award-winning science writer Steven Mithen.Along with the concepts of consciousness and intelligence, our capacity for language sits right at the core of what makes us human. But while the evolutionary origins of language have provoked speculation and impassioned debate, music has been neglected if not ignored. Like language it is a universal feature of human culture, one that is a permanent fixture in our daily lives.In THE SINGING NEANDERTHALS, Steven Mithen redresses the balance, drawing on a huge range of sources, from neurological case studies through child psychology and the communication systems of non-human primates to the latest paleoarchaeological evidence.The result is a fascinating and provocative work and a succinct riposte to those, like Steven Pinker, who have dismissed music as a functionless and unimportant evolutionary byproduct.

La aparición y el desarrollo del lenguaje es un elemento clave en la historia de la vida sobre la Tierra. Es cierto que no existe un acuerdo generalizado sobre sus orígenes, pero, en todo caso, el lenguaje nos permite comunicar ideas de todo tipo, desde la mas mundana hasta la mas abstracta. Ahora bien, intimamente asociado al lenguaje esta la musica, cuyas raices y desarrollo apenas han sido estudiados. ¿Posee su aparicion algun significado desde el punto de vista de la evolucion de las especies? En Los neandertales cantaban rap Steven Mithen establece las bases cientificas de la nocion popular de musica como el lenguaje de la emocion. Uniendo evidencias de todo tipo –como datos antropologicos, analisis de los sistemas de comunicacion utilizados en la vida salvaje (los de gorilas, bonobos, chimpances, cercopitecos o gibones), bases neurologicas de la musica y del lenguaje, Mithen logra componer un cuadro tan impresionante como fascinante que muestra las profundas similitudes que existen entre y el lenguaje y la musica, y por que esta desempeña un papel tan importante en nuestras vidas.

A tour de force Alice Roberts Wonderful A remarkably comprehensive biography of the single most important thing we all share language Robin DunbarThe relationship between language thought and culture is of concern to anyone with an interest in what it means to be human The Language Puzzle explains how the invention of words at 1 6 million years ago began the evolution of human language from the ape like calls of our earliest ancestors to our capabilities of today with over 6000 languages in the world and each of us knowing over 50 000 words Drawing on the latest discoveries in archaeology linguistics psychology and genetics Steven Mithen reconstructs the steps by which language evolved he explains how it transformed the nature of thought and culture and how we talked our way out of the Stone Age into the world of farming and swiftly into today s Digital Age While this radical new work is not shy to reject outdated ideas about language it builds bridges between disciplines to forge a new synthesis for the evolution of language that will find widespread acceptance as a new standard account for how humanity began