For more than a century we’ve known that much of human evolution occurred in an Ice Age. Starting about fifteen thousand years ago, temperatures began to rise, the glaciers receded, and sea levels rose. The rise of human civilization and all of recorded history occurred in this warm period, known as the Holocene. Until very recently we had no detailed record of climate changes during the Holocene.
Now we do. In this engrossing and captivating look at the human effects of climate variability, Brian Fagan shows how climate functioned as what the historian Paul Kennedy described as one of the “deeper transformations” of history—a more important historical factor than we understand.
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“This highly readable account of climate changes and their impact brings together a very deep knowledge of archaeology with imaginative narrative…A fascinating and provocative book.”
— Norman Cantor, author of Antiquity: Civilization of the Ancient World
“The Long Summer is a fascinating tale of humanity and climate, woven together seamlessly in the cloth of history.”
— Richard B. Alley, author of The Two-Mile Time MachineBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Brian Fagan is America’s leading writer on archaeology. Professor Emeritus of archaeology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he is the author of Floods, Famines, and Emperors, The Great Journey, and many other popular works, and he is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Archaeology. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.
Michael Langan works as a freelance editor, writing mentor, and teacher and also facilitates creative writing and critical reading workshops. He taught creative writing and English literature at Greenwich University, London, for ten years before giving it up to focus on his writing career. He was arts editor of the online LGBTQ arts and culture journal Polari Magazine, during which time he wrote on visual art, cinema, and books. For the past three years, he has joined forces with The Literary Consultancy (TLC), London, to offer manuscript assessments to emerging LGBTQ writers as part of TLC’s Free Reads scheme, sponsored by the Arts Council England.