- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: Headline Book Publishing; illustrated edition edition (17 Mar 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0755311779
- ISBN-13: 978-0755311774
- Product Dimensions: 28.2 x 25.8 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 212,796 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Amazon.co.uk Reviews
For all couchbound ramblers Walking with Cavemen will be another very welcome addition to the collection of BBC natural history spin-offs and will presumably complete the set that began with Walking with Dinosaurs.
Walking with Cavemen selects eight of our 20 or so extinct human relatives beginning with Australopithecus afarensis--small, upright, walking ape-like relatives who lived around 3.5 million years ago--and dramatises their various lifestyles. To be picky these were not cavemen but some of the earliest human relatives to move out of the protection of the trees into the more dangerous grasslands. However, there is no other simple catchall name for these ancestors--Walking with Hominids might not have quite the same public appeal. Nevertheless, this fascinating story of our ancestry is supported by numerous features explaining various aspects of the science behind the reconstructions. This is very necessary, for as with the dinosaur and extinct mammal stories, so much modelling and conjecture is sometimes based on fairly skimpy information. But this is pretty well state-of-the-art reconstruction and does an excellent job of bringing this otherwise somewhat neglected aspect of our deep past to light. Apart from the Neanderthals or perhaps Lucy, how many other extinct human relatives can you name? It is a pity the science is not supported by any further reading list or even appropriate Web site pointers.
Louise Barrett is an academic biological anthropologist at Liverpool University who specialises in ape behaviour. She has also authored some other very successful books of this kind such as Cousins, so we get not only an authoritative text but also a very readable one. John Lynch is a well-known producer of BBC TV science films and wrote the recent Wild Weather book. We have come to expect splendid illustrations and computer graphics from the TV programmes and their accompanying books and we get them here. In the richly illustrated Walking with Cavemen the still photos are mostly of human computers dressed to kill in amazing body suits and full facial prosthetics that must have been sheer hell to work in. Many of the images are really outstanding but in some the modelling looks less convincing. There are still some images that blend computer graphics of the odd mammoth and giant deer and there are plenty of naked bodies to satisfy naturists as well as naturalists. Reading Walking with Cavemen in the safety of your own home is certainly the most comfortable way to relive the trials and tribulations of our ancestors' lives. Imagine being spied upon by Robert Winston all the time. -- Douglas Palmer
Review
Accompanying a major four-part BBC1 series, this is the follow-up to the hugely successful Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Beasts.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
excellent for studying human evolution in NZ
its a bit cheesy with overdramatic music but the message is clear and accurate and memorable. Great.
its a bit cheesy with overdramatic music but the message is clear and accurate and memorable. Great.
8 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Looking back at old family photographs, we all get that sense of recognition, that understanding of our familial lineage. Friends and family looking at infants will often say, “he’s got his grandad’s nose”, or “she’s just like her mother was at that age”. But what if we were able to keep tracing those idiosyncrasies of character and physical nuances right back through time; not just a couple of generations, but hundreds of thousands of years?
BBC’s Walking With Cavemen begins some 3,500,000 years ago in East Africa with a male hominid, an entirely ape-like animal, hunched over to drink from a watering hole. This afarensis is being watched from the distance by his female counterpart. Cradling her infant, the female screams and runs with her offspring, as the male is savaged at the water’s edge in an unanticipated crocodile attack.
This scene at the watering hole is one typical of Walking With Cavemen. Working its way chronologically, chronically some might say, from those early bipedal pre-human animals to the more recognisable Neanderthals and later still homo sapiens of today [bless us]. The problem is, it all seems like much of a muchness. Yes, the body fur goes, and the nose gets thinner and more pronounced, but with every major evolutionary advancement the depiction is the same: some fighting, some hunting, some reproduction.
Walking with Cavemen does have a lot in its favour. The narrative is remarkably engaging for a subject that could have found itself bogged down by science. One scene in which a female hominid has her infant stolen and is later killed is both emotive and informative. And it is brimming with pictures from the BBC television series. With a subject matter that explains how we came into being, the book cannot really fail to hold some interest for all. That aside, the next time your dad tells you it’s about time you stood on your own two feet, ask him if he has any understanding of the evolutionary significance of bipedalism…that’ll shut him up.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
An essential addition to the series
31 Dec 2003
Format:Hardcover
Like the first two publications in the series, "Walking with Dinosaurs" and "Walking with Prehistoric Beasts," "Walking with Cavemen" follows the same format and is packed with full color photographs, but focuses exclusively on the evolution of humans. It describes the lives, trials, and even thought processes of the main "characters" in the story of mankind's development, including, but not limited to, Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, and modern Homo sapiens.
Unlike its predecessors, which feature a combination of computer-generated images and photographs, "Cavemen" uses no artificially produced images (except for some of the prehistoric animals), relying solely on actual photographs of live human models/actors with elaborate costumes and make-up artistry. The advantage is that this results in more realistic pictures because they are not doctored up, unlike those featured in "Dinosaurs" and "Beasts," some of which (though not all) appeared somewhat fake, because they were.
The downside, however, is that this resulted in a huge disparity between the appearances of the australopithecines of "Cavemen" and their computer-generated counterparts of "Beasts." It also, unfortunately, resulted in pictures which, though quite realistic, are disappointingly inaccurate. Not conforming to the text's descriptions of our ancestors who were long armed and short legged or with no chin, the pictures reveal Neanderthals with chins as prominent as ours and australopithecines with our body proportions.
Nevertheless, "Walking with Cavemen" is superb. The text, though inevitably speculative in places, is highly informative, enlightening, and thought-provoking, and the pictures go a long way toward giving us an idea of what it would actually be like to come face to face with our apelike ancestors. It is an excellent companion to the "Walking with Cavemen" video and a must for fans of "Walking with Dinosaurs" and "Walking with Prehistoric Beasts" as well as anyone with an interest in human evolution.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
A good companion book...
3 Mar 2007
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Walking With Cavemen is a great companion book to the TV series, even with a foreword by Nigel Marven who starred in the BBC version but was never in any of the versions I saw. The book follows the series, with inserts of information about the fossils, stone tools and archaeologists that allow us to know what we know.
But you have to remember that the series, and therefore the book, are mostly scenarios. Speculative reconstructions used to test our ideas and theories can sometimes seem outdated. And many are. But even if they prove to be wrong at least they tell us what early hominids did NOT do.
How do we know some lived in family groups? Well, if somebody broke a leg and lived long enough to heal they were most likely taken care of. But how do we know they developed whites in their eyes? Did they use stone tools to hunt or just process dead bodies they found? When was fire truly discovered and controlled?
We don't know or can only guess at some of it. But that is what makes such books and TV series so much fun.
But you have to remember that the series, and therefore the book, are mostly scenarios. Speculative reconstructions used to test our ideas and theories can sometimes seem outdated. And many are. But even if they prove to be wrong at least they tell us what early hominids did NOT do.
How do we know some lived in family groups? Well, if somebody broke a leg and lived long enough to heal they were most likely taken care of. But how do we know they developed whites in their eyes? Did they use stone tools to hunt or just process dead bodies they found? When was fire truly discovered and controlled?
We don't know or can only guess at some of it. But that is what makes such books and TV series so much fun.
An essential rediscovery of our evolutionary prehistoric past in cavemen
25 Nov 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Popular and ultimately continuing with the relese, of walking with the dinosaurs comes another series called walking with cavemen that,is to do with how our hominid family gradually and slowly evolved through means of adapation to climate within the area which became, for all primate species an epic saga for superemcy of survival that's existed within a branch that's stemmed out into a essential family tree of our prehistoric past of gaining a better idea on how we once were as species of hominid primates.Excellent book! five stars from me!
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