WOOD AGE

When our ancestors came down from the trees, they brought the trees with them and remade the world. How did the descendants of small arboreal primates manage to stand on our own two feet, become top predators, and take over the world? Roland Ennos shows that the key to humanity's success has been our relationship with wood. He takes us on a sweeping ten-million-year journey from great apes who built their nests among the trees, to early humans who depended on wood for fire, shelter, tools and weapons, from the structural design of wheels and woodwinds to the invention of paper and the printing press. He draws together evidence as far-ranging as primatology, anthropology, archaeology, history, architecture, engineering and carpentry, and charts for the first time how our ability to exploit wood's unique properties has shaped our bodies, minds, societies and lives. Chapters include Losing Our Hair, Tooling Up, Clearing the Forest, Melting and Smelting, Carving Our Communities, Supplying Life's Luxuries, Placing Firewood and Charcoal, Wood in the Nineteenth Century and In the Modern World and finally assessing our impact and mending our strange relationship and rediscovering traditional ways of growing, using and understanding trees that can help combat climate change and bring our lives into better balance with nature. 318pp in large softback, 23 illus.