Promotional Information

Links our penchant for domination, which is causing serious damage to the earth, to the Homo sapiens' adoption of big-game hunting 70,000 years ago and the consequent separation from, and eventual antagonism to, our fellow species.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1
1. The Dawn of Modern Culture: 70,000-50,000 Years Ago 11
2. The Conquest of Europe: 55,000-20,000 Years Ago 37
3. Intensification and Agriculture: 20,000-5,000 Years Ago 71
4. The Erectus Alternative: 1,800,000-30,000 Years Ago 105
Notes 139
Source Notes 145
Bibliography 175
Acknowledgments 179
Index 181

About the Author

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of a dozen books, including The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream; Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age; The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962–1992; and The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a former editor at the New York Times Magazine.

Reviews

"Kirkpatrick Sale has been enlightening us on the issue of scale for a generation now, and in this new book he uses the concept to help us understand our own consciousness. A fascinating book!"-- Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future "After Eden is broadly and punctiliously researched and urgently argued. Its central idea may be disputed but not ignored. Kirkpatrick Sale has always been both a deeply countercultural thinker and also immensely cultured."--Lionel Tiger, author of The Decline of Males: The First Look at an Unexpected New World for Men and Women "The things that Kirkpatrick Sale writes about are near and dear to me--things that I have spent most of my adult life thinking deeply about. Seldom would I have the confidence to reach judgments from the evidence as boldly as does Sale, but I suspect that he is right in most of his conclusions."--Steven E. Churchill, Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy, Duke University "Rumblings of dissatisfaction with Sale's ideas have preceeded the publication of [After Eden]... and yet the argument is so well documented, so well thought-out, so compelling, that its real threat is to become one of the truly important visions of our times... After Eden offers not only a detailed and integrated view of human history, but also encouraging glimpses into tools people might muster towards addressing the predicament we have all, in one way or another, inherited from history."--Resurgence No. 243 July/August 2007