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" When I was a youth I had a plain simple faith in progress. It seemed to me impossible that once man had passed a milestone of progress in one way that he could ever pass the same milestone again the other way. Once the telephone was invented it would stay invented. If civilizations had faded away it was just because they had not learned the secret of progress. Most people feel this way despite two world wars and the threat of total annihilation in a third"

These are the words of Charles Hapgood, cartographer and scientific lecturer and they sum up concisely how most people think about the path of progress. Scientific break- through leads to more of the same and the word moves ever onwards towards a better and more technologically advanced future. If this is true then it is possible to follow the history of this scientific development backwards to an ever more primitive past until we arrive at the beginning of mans journey to civilization. Our schools teach such an idea, it is accepted by the establishment and there is no reason to think it is otherwise so. If it were found that writing was in evidence around 8000 BC, rather than the accepted date of around 3000BC, then it would upset the applecart somewhat. Similarly if the Mesolithic period threw up evidence of skull surgery, it would be equally unexplainable given our current view of our past. However this is exactly the sort of out of context evidence that Richard Rudgley presents in his book, Lost Civilizations of The Stone Age. To say that this is a very important book is an understatement in the extreme, not content to push the boundaries; this book storms the Winter Palace of the academic status quo.

The problem we have made for ourselves is that our past is portrayed as having risen from some sort of cultural "big bang" about 5000 years ago, before then was a hunter gatherer culture supposedly achieving little and operating at a purely subsistence level, the other side of the watershed being a dramatic cultural rise to the modern age. If the evidence that Rudgley puts before us is to be believed, something is amiss in our view of our early development. Weaving together threads of evidence from archaeology, ancient history and anthropology, the author shows us just how myopic that view is. A convincing set of arguments shows that the achievements, inventions and discoveries of prehistoric times have been all bur edited out from the popular accounts of the human story. Writing, astronomy and mathematics

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