Welcome to Majipoor

Blurb

There were men before history. They lived and worked, argued and examined, loved and worshiped. They did not think of themselves as prehistoric or primitive. We know more tricks than they did; but they were not beasts, nor are we gods. What should astonish us, as we look at our ancestors of the prehistoric past, is not how different we are from them, but how very much the same.

The continent of Europe has been inhabited by man for perhaps a million years; less than 2,000 of those years have been recorded in written history. Much of this silent past, so long neglected for the study of the more advanced civilizations of Egypt and the Near East, has now been patiently recovered by archaeologists and prehistorians.

The stone tools of Neanderthal cave dwellers and the astonishing paintings of Cro-Magnon hunters in the caves of France and Spain lie at the beginnings of the prehistory of Europe. After the Ice Ages came changing ways of life developed by the peoples of the sea shore and the northern bogs; the migrations of the Neolithic farmers and the conquest of the great European forests; trade and colonization by the Beaker Folk, the Megalith Builders, and the Battle Axe peoples from Asia. Mr. Silverberg describes what archaeologists now know about the lives of these peoples, their habis and their art, and the mysterious religions which inspired such awesome works as England's Stonehenge.

THE MORNING OF MANKIND tells the entire sotry of Europe's men before history from the earliest Stone Age toolmakers to the complex civilizations of the Bronze and early Iron Ages.

ROBERT SILVERBERG is the author of many books on archaeology and anthropological subjects. A full-time writer since his graduation from Columbia in 1956, he lives in Riverdale, New York, and travels widely to explore and study sites and research materials for his books.

Contents

• The Morning of Mankind: Prehistoric Man in Europe