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The cave paintings and other preserved
remnants of Paleolithic peoples shed light on a world little
known to us, one so deeply impeded in time that information
about it seems unrecoverable. While art historians have
wrestled with these images and objects, very few scientists
have weighed in on Paleolithic art as artifacts of a complex,
living society. Dale Guthrie is one of the first to do so,
and his monumental volume The Nature of Paleolithic Art
is a landmark study that will shape our understanding of
these marvelous images for generations to come.
With a natural historian's keen eye for observation, and
as one who has spent a lifetime using bones and other excavated
materials to piece together past human behavior and environments,
Guthrie demonstrates that Paleolithic art is a mode of expression
we can comprehend to a remarkable degree, and that the perspective
of natural history is integral to that comprehension. He
employs a mix of ethology, evolutionary biology, and human
universals to access these distant cultures and their art
and artifacts. Guthrie uses innovative forensic techniques
to reveal new information; estimating, for example, the
ages and sexes of some of the artists, he establishes that
Paleolithic art was not just the creation of male shamans.
With more than 3,000 images, The Nature
of Paleolithic Art offers the most comprehensive representation
of Paleolithic art ever published and a radical (and controversial)
new way of interpreting it. The variety and content of these
images -- most of which have never been available or easily
accessible to nonspecialists or even researchers -- will
astonish you. This wonderfully written work of natural history,
of observation and evidence, tells the great story of our
deepest past.
R. Dale Guthrie (whitemammoth@alaska.net)
grew up in Nebo, Illinois. In 1963 he received his PhD from
the University of Chicago and was happy to take his first
job offer at the University of Alaska. As a natural historian
and sculptor, Guthrie works in both art and science -- and
in between. It seems to be the life that many a kid dreams
of -- traveling around the world, digging up Ice Age fossils,
and crawling back into caves to look at prehistoric art.
Numerous sabbatical and year-long award leaves have supported
extensive time in Africa, Australia, Europe, and Siberia.
His previous book with the University of Chicago Press was
Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe for which he received
the national Kirk Bryan Award in Research Excellence. Widely
published, Guthrie was the recipient of the German Alexander
von Humboldt Research Prize and a visiting fellow award
at Corpus Christi College Cambridge. He is professor emeritus
at the University of Alaska, and for the past 40 years has
lived with his family in a rural area outside Fairbanks
where moose raid their vegetable garden and occasional lynx
and bear tracks mark the lower woods.
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