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Rating: 
Summary: Julian Jaynes without the neurology
Review: This book can be a difficult read, especially for someone (like myself) with no formal training in archeology. There should have been some more maps..There is a valuable chronological table in the front matter -- Cauvin doesn't remind you to make reference to it as often as he might, but it IS there. On the whole, the book was an eye opener. Cauvin makes a powerful case that there was a revolution in the way people think that preceded the various material elements in the Neolithic revolution, circa 10,000 BC. First there came a consciousness of the divine -- goddesses showed up in carvings regularly enough to indicate a female monotheism. This consciousness caused humans in the valley of the Jordan and in the plain of Aleppo to think of themselves as different from the natural world around them -- the gazelles and goats we hunt don't pray to the goddess, but we do, so we are obviously a different sort of being than they. With that thought came a lot of others -- the deliberate cultivation of grain, the taming of those goats into herds, new sorts of architecture, including somne unnatural right angled corners. It was all coded, many millennia later, in Genesis. Recognition of one's "nakedness" before God. The end of the easy hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Then Abel and the cultivation of grain. Then Cain, his younger brother, and the cultivation of tame animals. But why did this new consciousness happen anyway? Cauvin doesn't offer any explanation. Julian Jaynes tried to offer one, decades ago (the "breakdown of the bicameral mind"), subsequent developments in neurology haven't been kind, and he seems to have had the chronology a bit off, too. Maybe the goddess just chose that moment to reveal herself.
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