The Botanic Age: Planting the Seeds of Human Evolution

Feminist anthropologists have long theorized that the first tools were actually nests, slings, and baskets that would not have survived in the archaeological record. Dean Falk argues that millions of years of weaving botanical materials and woodworking preceded the Stone Age, facilitating the basic neurological underpinnings for human creativity and technological inventions. Mothers and infants may hold the key to understanding a series of events that eventually kindled the emergence of advanced cognitive abilities, including language and music.

Format: Hardback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 31 January 2025
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

The Botanic Age is a groundbreaking new book that challenges traditional theories about the origin and evolution of human intelligence. Written by leading evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk, the book argues that the first tools were actually nests, slings, and baskets that would not have survived in the archaeological record. Instead, millions of years of weaving botanical materials and woodworking preceded the Stone Age, facilitating the basic neurological underpinnings for humankinds later creative and technological inventions. Falk further suggests that mothers and infants may hold the key to understanding a series of events that eventually kindled the emergence of advanced cognitive abilities, including language and music. The book takes readers millions of years into the past to a time before our relatives began living full-time on the ground, and from this vantage point in the trees, we can really begin to understand how and why our ancestors evolved – and how we became human.

Weight: 506g
Dimension: 149 x 225 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781487546649