For more than a century we've known that much of human evolution
occurred in an Ice Age. Starting about 15,000 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.