Coming Home to the Pleistocene

Bibliographic Data

ID9292728
AuthorsDale A Stirling (0000-0002-8291-4441, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume1
Issue11
Publication date1999-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeREVIEW
Review ofComing Home to the Pleistocene, Paul Shepard, 2013
VenueElectronic Green Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1076-7975 • E-ISSN: 1076-7975
PublisherUniversity of Idaho Library (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5070/g311110367
OpenAlexW214307787
LanguageEN

Review: Coming Home to the Pleistocene By Paul Shepard Reviewed by Dale A. Stirling Intertox, Inc., USA Shepard, Paul. Coming Home to the Pleistocene. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1998. 240 pp. Tables. Index. Cloth: $24.95. ISBN: 1- In one slim volume, noted naturalist author Paul Shepard crosses the terrain of anthropology, history, naturalism, and genetics in one broad stroke. In the process he condemns those who chronicle or attempt to explain past human events, and, at the same time, does his best to explain why we should or could return to our Pleistocene roots. His tactic of condemnation is at times infuriating and confounding. And yet his book is quite fascinating and this reviewer will be reading it again, perhaps several times over the next few years. Shepard, who died in 1996, was the author of several books that attempted to explain man’s connection to nature, but with this work he has purported to coalesce all his experience and opinion into one book. However, Shepard did not complete the manuscript prior to his death. Therefore his wife Florence edited the book and took on the task of filling in the blanks. As she explains in the preface In a couple of instances, I added an Editor’s note from material that I thought he might have found pertinent (p. ix-x). I think she suffers familiarity well, but may makes leaps of faith and assumption that cannot be fully relied upon. Shepard introduces the book with the statement that This book is about our self-consciousness as individuals and our world-view as a species based on the biological legacy and cultural influences we inherited from our ancestors, the Pleistocene hunter/gatherers (also called foragers) (p. 1). Over the next nine chapters, Shepard attempts to explain how the Pleistocene is relevant to our present. In Chapter 1, The Relevance of the Past, he does little to explain the relevance; rather, he uses it as soapbox to slam history. It is a curious exercise that achieves little. A typical example is his statement that history does not resolve our confusion but further misleads us with its mix of dreams and visions, infantile mnemonics, Golden Ages, Christian paradises, escapism, ethnographic misinformation, and fundamentalist attempts to make of it a mythology (p. 15). But then he makes more clear whey he disavows history by concluding, the prehistoric unconscious forms a better basis

Art history · Epistemology · Faith · Naturalism · Theology · Wife · Classics · History · Marine and environmental studies · Philosophy · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life

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