Discover the vital aspects of various species, how they feed, mate, and learn about their natural environment.

    This richly illustrated, encyclopedic book complementing a 1999 exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, documents Ainu archaeology, ethnology, history, and modern life, presenting their traditional artifacts, clothing, art, and belief systems in the past and today.

    Each chapter covers the animals themselves, the processes that brought them to extinction, and the modern scientific discoveries that reveal their lost worlds.

    For each of life's milestones - sexual intercourse, conception, pregnancy, birth, puberty, love, marriage, parenting, menopause and death - they describe the biology behind our actions and consider how pressures imposed by various historical and contemporary cultures have further influenced our behaviour. By looking back at the past they attempt to make sense of the present, to see how and why these cultural modifications arose, how they have contributed to the richness of human sexual behaviour, and what our biological and cultural inheritance can teach us about safeguarding the continuation of our species.

    

    Gabriel Cooney argues that the archaeological evidence demonstrates a much more complex picture than the current orthodoxy on Neolithic Europe, with its assumption of mobile lifestyles, suggests. He integrates the study of landscape, settlement, agriculture, material culture and burial practice to offer a rounded, realistic picture of the complexities and the realities of Neolithic lives and societies in Ireland.

    Do prehistoric stone monuments in Britain and Ireland incorporate deliberate astronomical alignments, and if so, what is their purpose and meaning? This work provides an account of megalithic astronomy debates and examines prehistoric man's concern with celestial bodies and events.

    It is all too easy to guess at the meanings the images carry. This pioneering set of essays instead explores how we can reliably learn from rock art as a material record of distant times by adapting the proven methods of archaeology to the special subject of rock art.