New edition of Que sais-je? on ‘The Palaeolithic’ by Boris Valentin.

The history of mankind is essentially Paleolithic: for three million years, humans did without agriculture and animal husbandry, gathering all their resources. These prehistoric societies nevertheless followed a variety of paths, while humans themselves underwent an anatomical evolution. To be a palaeolithicist is to try to understand this distant human history, to think about the origins of art, the emergence of language or the birth of technical innovations from incomplete sources and on unusual timescales. Boris Valentin invites us to understand how researchers investigate these immemorial times and what we know today about a period that is all the more captivating because it brings us face to face both with the ancient history of our own species and with forms of humanity far removed from our own. (publisher’s summary)

Available in print and digital editions on the publisher’s website