I've long hoped that we can dispel the false image in pop culture of the 'caveman' wielding a rough club and dragging a woman along by her hair. I think we have an obligation to seriously address that image, which is used to justify so much faulty reasoning and research. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen here. ( )

I really wanted to like this book, but found it very difficult to finish; I got more and more irritated the further I got.
The book covers the origins of Cro-Magnons in Europe, and aspects of their way of life up to the Last Glacial Maximum (about 21000 years BCE). The origin and extinction of Neanderthals are also covered. Some of the material is now out of date (e.g. does not take account of the recent discovery via mitochondrial DNA that there was interbreeding between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals); nevertheless there is interesting content here.
The things that really rubbed me the wrong way were

- the insistence on 'story-telling', including a kind of 'text-fade' ellipsis to imagined scenarios in Cro-Magnon life (disproportionately involving men hunting). I found these scenarios intrusive, irritating, fanciful, not useful as illustration, and thematically repetitive (did I mention the HUNTING?). They also depended a lot on Fagan's obviously unquestioned assumptions about, especially, gender roles and spiritual beliefs. There are also numerous self-indulgent anecdotes about his field work experience (once he was caught in a storm on an inland sea! This is relevant to... exactly nothing).

- the tendency to go FAR beyond the available evidence. To be fair, much of the time Fagan at least lets us know this is what he is doing (e.g. saying he 'makes no apology' for extrapolating Cro-Magnon behaviours from those of the Inuit), but sometimes he doesn't even seem to realise that is what he is doing, and even when he is aware the evidence is equivocal, he notes this and then proceeds to treat his preferred view as fact. He frequently talks about the Cro-Magnons' spiritual beliefs (e.g. in relation to cave paintings) not only in terms of there being a spiritual motivation for behaviours/artifacts, but also in terms of the content of those beliefs. He refers throughout to women (and only women) sewing the clothes. He talks a lot about how the men had to do a lot of physical work outside, referring to hunting - and assumes the women all stayed at home, sewing the clothes and doing other stereotypical women's work (although they went out to trap small animals). One thing I wondered, and which doesn't seem to be on Fagan's radar at all, is: how did they get water to their camps? They would have needed this for drinking, washing, and also to soak bone and wood before further processing. If we are extrapolating from present-day communities, this is a hard physical task which is almost exclusively performed by women. Likewise, how did the firewood or other material for fires get to the camp?
For all we know, Fagan's assumptions may be correct. My point is that we don't know this - the evidence does not exist to tell us that only women ever did the sewing, or that Cro-Magnons believed that putting a handprint on a cave wall allowed them to derive strength from the rock. Fagan is fond of saying that there are only so many ways people can survive in these environments. But this doesn't cover either gender roles or spirituality. Moreover, the reason for insisting on evidence is that we all wear cultural blinders - something that seems to us obvious, or natural, or necessarily universal, may be none of these things.

- the sheer repetitiveness of much of the material. Some things just seem to come up again and again and again (the aforementioned spiritual beliefs, the need to know a lot about the animals you hunted, etc etc). Because of this, and also because of the padding due to the fictional scenarios and the time spent talking about what (he assumes) must have been true (even though there is no evidence), the actual amount of information in this book is quite small.

I would still like to find a reliable, evidence based, book on the origins of modern homo sapiens which doesn't continually swerve off into self-indulgent irrelevancies. ( )

If you've ever wondered what life may have been like for Neandrethals or Cro-Magnons, ancestors of modern homo sapiens, this book may provide some insights. While any descriptions are by necessity at best a guess, Brian Fagan at least has the background to offer an educated guess.
Fagan also writes in a style intended to engage a general audience, in that he uses descriptive stories of Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals as if he was an observer. On the other hand, he also includes a good mix of general science to make his stories credible. After reading the book, it's interesting to ponder just how old human life is on our planet, and how climate changes over the eons impacted life and migration of ancient peoples. ( )

Well, this became dated and wrong rather quickly. A lot of far reaching assumptions and author's imagination running wild without any scientific basis given. ( )

This was a really interesting book and the author went into good descriptive detail about the history of the Cro-Magnons. Fascinating to think Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon shared the earth for a time. ( )