Never kill a human unprovoked. Never allow a mixed-blood wolf to live. At least that's what the wolves of the Wide Valley believe. Until a young wolf dares to break the rules--and forever alters the relationship between wolves and the humans who share their world.This is the story of such a wolf. Born of a forbidden mixed-blood litter and an outcast after her mother is banished, Kaala is determined to earn a place in the Swift River pack. But her world is turned upside down when she saves a human girl from drowning. Risking expulsion from their pack and exile from the Wide Valley, Kaala and her young packmates begin to hunt with the humans and thus discover the long-hidden bond between the two clans. But when war between wolves and humans threatens, Kaala learns the lies behind the wolf's promise. Lies that force her to choose between safety for herself and her friends and the survival of her pack--and perhaps of all wolf- and humankind. Set 14,000 years ago, Promise of the Wolves takes us to a land where time is counted in phases of the moon, distance is measured in wolflengths, and direction by the scent of the nearest trail. Years of research into the world of wolves combines with mythical tale-telling to present a fantastical adventure set in a world filled with lore.

    Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

    It takes another three billion years of evolving life forms until it finally happens, a primate super species emerges: mankind. In conjunction with History Channel's hit television series by the same name, Mankind is a sweeping history of humans from the birth of the Earth and hunting antelope in Africa's Rift Valley to the present day with the completion of the Genome project and the birth of the seven billionth human. Like a Hollywood action movie, Mankind is a fast-moving, adventurous history of key events from each major historical epoch that directly affect us today such as the invention of iron, the beginning of Buddhism, the crucifixion of Jesus, the fall of Rome, the invention of the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, and the invention of the computer. With more than 300 color photographs and maps, Mankind is not only a visual overview of the broad story of civilization, but it also includes illustrated pop-out sidebars explaining distinctions between science and history, such as why there is 700 times more iron than bronze buried in the earth, why pepper is the only food we can taste with our skin, and how a wobble in the earth's axis helped bring down the Egyptian Empire. This is the most exciting and entertaining history of mankind ever produced.

    But when one of her brothers goes hunting and never returns, the fragile balance of life is upset. Half-starved and maddened with grief, Alaia's mother follows her visions and goes in search of her lost son. Then a stranger from a rival tribe appears on their hearth seeking shelter. Are his stories of a great wave and a people perished really to be believed? What else could drive a man to travel alone between tribes in the depths of winter?Hopes of resolution come when Alaia's mother returns home as a Go-Between, one able to commune with the spirits. But as all the Auk people come together for their annual Gathering Night, who there will listen to the voice of a woman?The Gathering Night is a story of conflict, loss, love, adventure and devastating natural disasters. This utterly enchanting pre-historical novel is set deep in our stone-age past, but resonates as a parable of our troubled planet 8000 years on.

    Maybe it's made of silicon! Maybe it has wheels! Or maybe it doesn't. In The Equations of Life, biologist Charles S. Cockell makes the forceful argument that the laws of physics narrowly constrain how life can evolve, making evolution's outcomes predictable. If we were to find on a distant planet something very much like a lady bug eating something like an aphid, we shouldn't be surprised. The forms of life are guided by a limited set of rules, and as a result, there is a narrow set of solutions to the challenges of existence.A remarkable scientific contribution breathing new life into Darwin's theory of evolution, The Equations of Life makes a radical argument about what life can -- and can't -- be.

    Entire cities are replaced by primeval forests. Prehistoric monsters stalk modern city streets, hunting for human prey.While ordinary men and women struggle to survive in this strange new world, the president and his advisers search for a way to undo the catastrophe. But the solution may be more devastating than the dinosaurs....

    Glaciers three-miles-high rise over the continents. The old stories say that when the Jemen, godlike beings from the past, realized their efforts to halt global warming had gone terribly wrong, they made a desperate gamble to save life on earth and recreated species that had survived the worst of the earth's Ice Ages.Sixteen-summers-old Lynx and his best friend Quiller are members of the Sealion People--archaic humans known as Denisovans. They live in a world growing colder, a world filled with monstrous predators that hunt them for food. When they flee to a new land, they meet a strange old man who impossibly seems to be the last of the Jemen. He tells Lynx the only way he can save his world is by sacrificing himself to the last true god, a quantum computer named Quancee.

    Girl, the oldest daughter, is coming of age and her family is determined to travel to the meeting place to find her a mate. But the unforgiving landscape takes its toll, and Girl is left alone to care for Runt, a foundling. As Girl and Runt face the coming winter, Girl realizes she has one chance to save her people, at great cost to herself.In the present, archaeologist Rosamund Gale works well into her pregnancy, racing to excavate newly found Neanderthal artifacts before her baby arrives. Linked across the ages by the shared experience of birth and early motherhood, and inspired by the recent discovery that many modern humans have inherited DNA from Neanderthals, Girl's story and Rosamund's story examines the often taboo corners of women's lives.

    . . The First Americans. When humans first walked the world, when nature ruled the earth and sky, a proud tribe is threatened by a series of natural disasters. A bold young hunter named Torka, who lost his wife and child to a killer mammoth, leads the survivors over the glacial tundra on a desperate eastward odyssey to the save their clan. Through attacks of savage animals and encounters with strangers not unlike themselves, they must brave the hardships of a foreign landscape and learn to live in an exotic new world of mystery and danger. They must travel toward the land where the sun rises for a new day for their clan--and an awesome future for the American.

    Through scrupulous research and vivid first-person reporting, The First Human reveals the perils and the promises of fossil hunting on a grand competitive scale.

    From sensations that probably began in bodily expression to the evolutionary advantages of a conscious self, 'Seeing Red' tracks the 'hard problem' of consciousness to its source and its solution, a solution in which, paradoxically, the very hardness of the problem may make all the difference.

    Through Jean M. Auel’s magnificent storytelling we are taken back to the dawn of modern humans, and with a girl named Ayla we are swept up in the harsh and beautiful Ice Age world they shared with the ones who called themselves The Clan of the Cave Bear.A natural disaster leaves the young girl wandering alone in an unfamiliar and dangerous land until she is found by a woman of the Clan, people very different from her own kind. To them, blond, blue-eyed Ayla looks peculiar and ugly--she is one of the Others, those who have moved into their ancient homeland; but Iza cannot leave the girl to die and takes her with them. Iza and Creb, the old Mog-ur, grow to love her, and as Ayla learns the ways of the Clan and Iza’s way of healing, most come to accept her. But the brutal and proud youth who is destined to become their next leader sees her differences as a threat to his authority. He develops a deep and abiding hatred for the strange girl of the Others who lives in their midst, and is determined to get his revenge.

    But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization.Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, David Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. He explains how they spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in copper mining, warfare, and patron-client political institutions, thereby ushering in an era of vibrant social change. Anthony also describes his fascinating discovery of how the wear from bits on ancient horse teeth reveals the origins of horseback riding.The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries--the source of the Indo-European languages and English--and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.

    However, recent discoveries of astonishing accomplishments from the Neolithic Age - in art, technology, writing, math, science, religion, medicine and exploration - demand a fundamental rethinking of humanity before the dawn of written history.In this fascinating book, Richard Rudgley describes how:* The intrepid explorers of the Stone Age discovered all of the world's major land masses long before the so-called Age of Discovery* Stone Age man performed medical operations, including amputations and delicate cranial surgeries* Paleolithic cave artists of Western Europe used techniques that were forgotten until the Renaissance* Prehistoric life expectancy was better than it is for contemporary third-world populationsRudgley reminds us just how savage so-called civilized people can be, and demonstrates how the cultures that have been reviled as savage were truly civilized. The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age shows the great debt that contemporary society owes to its prehistoric predecessors. It is a rich introduction to a lost world that will redefine the meaning of civilization itself.

    How was this possible? What meaning and messages did the cavemen want these paintings to convey? In addition, how did these perfect drawings come about at a time when man’s sole purpose was surviving? And why, some ten thousand years later, did startlingly similar animal paintings appear once again, on dark cave walls?Scholars and archaeologists have for centuries pored over these works of art, speculating and hoping to come away with the key to the mystery. No one until now has ever come close to elucidating either their origin or their meaning.In their stunning book and for the first time, David and Lefrère, after working together for years, give us a new understanding of an art lost in time, revealing what had until recently remained unexplainable—the oldest enigma in humanity has been solved.