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The notion of progress still bedevils our conception of prehistory, with human evolution persistently seen as a movement from inferior to superior, primitive to advanced, simple to complex. Timewalkers extricates prehistory from the myths and distortions created by this view of the past. By focusing on changes in behavior and stressing the deliberate human purpose our ancestors displayed in their migrations, Clive Gamble produces a fresh and frankly provocative synthesis of the archaeology of the last three million years. This new approach to human prehistory proceeds from a detailed study of global colonization rather than a conventional reassessment of fossil remains and stone tools. Gamble reconsiders the remarkable record of geographical expansion that began with the early hominids of sub-Saharan Africa who spread to new continents, to the marginal environments of desert and taiga, and to islands in the oceans and the Mediterranean. Through this astonishing dispersal of humans, which exceeds that of all,other mammals, he traces calculated responses to variations in climate and environment. As he interprets these migrations in terms of behavioral change in a social and ecological context, Gamble offers a revealing critique of the attitudes of early European explorers, on which so much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeology unquestioningly rested. Timewalkers makes the latest findings of prehistoric archaeology accessible in a readable, coherent form. Gamble's novel reinterpretation of this evidence, presented with wit and authority, enlarges and enlivens our understanding of human action and motivation in the distant past.… (more)
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However, I didn't quite find his presentation and his answers intellectually satisfying. It is to some extent understandable that no very definite answers can be given. The prehistoric evidence would probably be overinterpreted if one was to give only one reason for all prehistoric migrations. But in the concluding chapter, titled "why people were everywhere", the author resorts to the rather placid explanation that "humans went everywhere because humans have purpose". I found this puzzling since "purpose" had not been discussed at all in the earlier chapters, and simply concluding that migration and settlement were deliberate hardly explains why it was successful.
Intriguingly, on several occasions in the book the author actually points toward a more informative answer: increased social interaction. He mentions in passing that the extension of range was the product of more complicated social organization, that social relationships are a form of storage, and that similarities in archeological items indicate increasing scale in social systems as prehistoric colonization proceeded. This seems to make intuitive sense. Wider, peaceful social networks and trade would have multiplied the knowledge and resources available to prehistoric humans, which presumably would have aided migration and settlement.
Unfortunately it is hard to say to what extent these claims of expanding social networks are just unwarranted speculation on the part of the author, or actually supported by evidence. The author does not pursue questions of social scale consistently. Perhaps such questions cannot be reliably investigated by paleontological means, but then he could have written so explicitly.
In summary, the present conclusion, which bears little resemblance to the preceding presentation, would probably have been better left unstated. Since the author set out to answer a general question, he could have re-examined his entire argument more critically to find the archeological and paleontological tracks which could lead to general conclusions with real interest.