There is a vast, under-appreciated stretch of artistic and technological development starting about 40,000 years ago and extending through the rise of the first historically documented societies. These entries are devoted to the gardeners, mariners, philosophers, and tinkerers of that period who laid the basis for everything we think of as civilization.

The Ancient Wisdom of Shamans and Alchemists

• The Horizons of Prehistory
• The Invention of the Neolithic
• The Ancient Alchemists
• The First Urbanites
• Of Seas and Skies

 
In Fairy-Tale Time

• How We Got So Pretty
• Searching for Once Upon a Time
• On the Antiquity of Fairy Tales
• Civilization beyond Civilization, Part I
• Civilization beyond Civilization, Part II: The Aristo Factor
• The Efflux of Osiris

 
The Ice Age and Its Ending

• Of Hollow Bone Flutes and the Imperative to “Be That Empty”
• A Lost World
• Food Forests
• Times of Great Fear