© Peter Watson 2017 The first two chapters set the scene, chapter three describes the domestication of the dog, chapter four outlines the current orthodoxy about the Neolithic Revolution – which , to an extent, I challenge – and the remaining chapters discuss the more immediate, and more important, consequences, consequences that are still with us and challenge us.  Chapter 1: At the End of the Ice: Two Types of Shelter We begin with the cave art that blazed through Europe and Eurasia between 40,000 BC and 12,000 BC (all dates are approximate), after which (for reasons that are still disputed but are central to my argument) it dies out. This was the first time that we have enough symbolic evidence to try to understand what ancient people thought and believed. Interpretation is never easy, of course, but a consensus has emerged, a consensus that – again, to an extent – I challenge. The central questions that need to be asked about this art are: Why and when did it begin? Why did it have the range that it did? What does its content tell us about the mental life of early people as the Ice Age came to an end? Why did the art end when it did? The best argument we have for when and why cave art began where it did lies in the development of a new lifestyle, having to do with the extent and then the retreat of the ice toward the end of the Ice Age, what is known as the Upper Pleistocene. During the Ice Age, obviously enough, much of the northern hemisphere was uninhabitable. The ice extended down to where Oxford is now and the permafrost reached as far south as a third of the way down France. Below that, however, was a vast swathe of savannah, known now as the ‘mammoth steppe’. This extended across a huge region, from the Atlantic coast of France and northern Spain all the way to central and eastern Asia, just north of the Middle East, and reached as far as Alaska. Its southern edge was limited by the mainly east-west ranges of the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Tien Shan and the Qilian Shan in China and Kyrgystan and the Altai in