Acknowledgements

I want to express my thanks to the huge team of people who made this book and the BBC2 television series possible.

The producers, Michael Moseley, Kim Shillinglaw and Paul Bradshaw, made the journey happen and kept it on track!

I was away filming for around 26 weeks, through the spring and summer of 2008, and I couldn’t have done it without the love and support of my husband, Dave Stevens, who stayed at home while I roamed the world. I’m extremely grateful to the originators of Skype and Facebook for helping me stay in contact with family and friends when I was far, far away.

I must also thank my Head of Department, Jeremy Henley, the Department of Anatomy and the University of Bristol, for granting me a leave of absence, allowing me to take the wonderful opportunity of making this journey.

Many friends and colleagues have kindly assisted me with this book.

I am massively indebted to Stephen Oppenheimer, Colin Groves and Jo Kamminga, for their careful reading of early drafts and wise advice and guidance. Many of the producers, directors and researchers on the series, especially Kim Shillinglaw, Paul Bradshaw, Dave Stewart, Pete Oxley, Naomi Law, Mags Lightbody and Sam Cronin, also provided me with valuable feedback and fact checks. Many thanks are due to Martha Sullivan and Jodie Pashley for furnishing me with transcripts of interviews.

I am very grateful to Chris Stringer (Natural History Museum) and Peter Forster (Anglia Ruskin University) for their thoughtful advice.

And to Paul Valdes and Joy Singarayer (Bristol Research Initiative for the Dynamic Global Environment – BRIDGE – University of Bristol), climate consultants for the series, for sharing the palaeoclimate maps with me. Enormous thanks to Dave Stevens who took my rough sketches and made them into beautiful maps and diagrams.

Thank you to everyone involved with filming the series. Each of the five programmes – corresponding with the chapters in this book – was filmed by a different team, with a cast of contributors, some of whom I have written about in the book, others whom I must remember here.

In Africa: thanks to Dave Stewart, producer/director extraordinaire (thank you for recommending The Songlines!); Mags Lightbody, who saved my laptop in Dubai, and carried Omo II ‘home’ in a shawl; Graham Smith (‘the bear’), cameraman, often to be seen hanging out the side of a helicopter or small plane; Rob McGregor, camera assistant/ cameraman – thank you for yoga on the beach and for hauling me off the rocks in Israel; Andrew Yarme, soundman – thank you for driving to Cape Town and for the Sounds of Omo!

Thanks also to Arno and Estelle Oostuysen, for looking after us at Nhoma camp; all the Bushmen of Nhoma, and Theo for keeping guard on our night in the bush; to Raj Ramesar, for an introduction to Capetonian genetics, and all the study participants who shared their results with us; Kyle Brown, for the tour around Pinnacle Point; Jeff Rose, for introducing me to Omani archaeology; and Yoel Rak, for showing me Skhul Cave.

In India, Southeast Asia and Australia: thanks to Ed Bazalgette, producer/director (and outback-barbie guitarist); Naomi Law, researcher and macarena teacher, goddess of organisation and serenity (remember the night when the lights went out in Mungo?); Chris Titus King, cameraman with an excellent sense of the absurd; Freddie Claire, soundman, with a joke for every occasion (Poppadom preach and Indian otters); Alex Byng, camera assistant; Phil Dow, camera assistant in Oz; Toby Sinclair, fixer extraordinaire in India (thank you for the jasmine garlands!); and Alan d’Cruz, fixer in Malaysia.

Many thanks to Michael Petraglia and Ravi Korisettar, for giving up time to talk to me during their excavation at Jwalapuram; Bert Roberts, for fascinating insight into luminescence dating and the Hobbit controversy; Stephen Oppenheimer, for talking to me about genetics and phylogeography, and for reviewing the India-to-Australia chapter – huge thanks; Hamid Isa, for his knowledge of the Semang people; Ipoi Datan, for bringing the Niah skull back to its findspot; Tony Djubiantono, for letting me examine the bones from Flores; Robert Bednarik, for masterminding the construction of a Stone Age raft; Sally May, fixer and Australian rock art expert in Gunbalanya; Anthony Murphy and all the artists at the Injalak Arts & Crafts Centre; Michael Westaway, archaeologist at Mungo; Alan Thorne, for introducing me to Mungo Man; and Sheila van holst Pellekaan, for an insight into Australian genetics.

In Siberia and China: thanks to Fiona Cushley, assistant producer, for her Russian expertise and walking the wall with me; Tim Cragg, cameraman,

Adam Prescod, soundman and Jack Burton, second cameraman, for keeping going in the c-c-cold; and Qian Hong, fixer in China.

I am also grateful to Svetlana Demeshchenko, head curator at the Hermitage, for letting me see the beautiful artefacts from Mal’ta; Vladimir Pitulko, for talking to me about Yana – and for trying to get me there!; Piers Vitebsky and Anatoly Alekseyev, for introducing me to Arctic culture; Jo Kamminga, for teaching me to make a bamboo knife, and for reviewing the manuscript of this book – and for my copy of Prehistory of Australia; Xingzhi Wu, for introducing me to Zhoukoudian and Peking Man; Wei Jun, Wang Hao Tian, Liu Cheng Jie and Liu Cheng Yi; and Fu Xianguo, for an introduction to early Chinese pottery.

In Europe: thanks to Phil Smith, producer/director, for his excellent direction and wry sense of humour (though I’m sad that River Euphrates was not on the soundtrack!); Finola Lang, assistant producer, for her girly company; Jonathan Partridge, cameraman and gentleman; Simon Farmer, soundman, for his beautiful watercolour postcards; Adrian O’Toole, camera assistant, ‘they’ll like that back at broadcasting hice’; (and thank you to all of the above for my massive Romanian birthday cake).

Thank you to Michael Pitts and John Chambers, diver cameraman and diving buddy in Gibraltar; Nathalie Cabrier, formidable fixer in France, with her infallible sense of direction!; Klaus Schmidt, director of the Göbekli Tepe site; Silviu Constantin, Mihai Bacin, Virgil Dragusin and Alexandra Hillebrand, for taking me to Peştera cu Oase, and for the book of caves; Clive and Gerry Finlayson, and Darren Fa, for conversations about Neanderthals and the sea caves of Gibraltar; Nick Conard, for showing me the site and the beautiful artefacts from Vogelherd, and for giving me such an insight into the Swabian Aurignacian; Wulf Hein, for showing me how to use an atlatl, and sorry for losing your arrows in the long grass; Katerina Harvati, for her knowledge of heads and hybrids; Ed Green, for explaining the Neanderthal Genome Project to me; Jiri Svoboda, for taking me to the vineyards of Dolní Vìstonice and showing me the wonderful ivory carvings in the museum; Martina Laznickova, for helping me to make a reconstruction of the Dolní Vìstonice Venus; Randall White, for an introduction to the Aurignacian and Abri Castanet; Michel Lorblanchet, for his demonstration of Palaeolithic stencilling technique, and for being my guide in Cougnac Cave; and The Musee Duyputren, for letting me examine rachitic skeletons there. And many thanks to Bruce Bradley and Metin Eren for the lesson in Palaeolithic stone tool manufacture.

In the Americas: thanks to Pete Oxley, producer/director, for not losing me in a tar pool and down a crevasse!; Clare Duncan, assistant producer; Paul Jenkins, cameraman (we were good up that glacier, weren’t we?); Simon Farmer, soundman and catalogue model; and David McDowall, assistant cameraman (What! No beer at a folk festival?!).

Also: Karina Rehavia, fixer in Brazil – thank you for looking after us and for rescuing my books! Thanks to Mike Collins and the Gault team; John Johnson on Santa Rosa; John Harris, for getting me into a sticky mess at La Brea tar pits; Rolf Mathewes and his pollen at Simon Fraser University; Rob Toohey, for looking after me in the water and up on the glacier; Jim Orava, for teaching me to ice-climb; Quentin Mackie, for introducing me to some Canadian bears; Tracey Pierre and the Tsuu T’ina First Nation in Canada; Walter Neves and the Brazilian National Museum, for introducing me to Luzia; and Mario Piño for talking me around the site at Monte Verde.

(And thank you to everyone else I have mentioned in the book.)

The views and opinions expressed in this book, where I am not reporting on specific items of published research, are my own – as are any mistakes.

Many thanks to my agents, Hilary Murray and Luigi Bonomi.

Finally, I am hugely grateful to my editors, Richard Atkinson and Natalie Hunt, to my patient copyeditor, Richard Collins, and to the whole team at Bloomsbury.