Any book by Clive Gamble is good news for those interested in a broader, integrated view of human evolution: it will be thoughtful, provocative, and enlightening. This latest volume is no exception. Written at least in part as a response to some of the hype surrounding the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage, it asks the question of why people have turned out to be almost everywhere on the globe...Gamble has set himself a considerable task in seeking to weave a coherent cloth from the threads of a multitude of disciplines and subdisciplines, from archaeology through physical anthropology and paleoenvironmental reconstruction to evolutionary theory...There is much food for thought here, and [Timewalkers] represents the kind of effort that must be made to integrate the massive amount of information that we now have about evolution in general and the development, and context of development, of our own species in particular.
-- Alan Turner Quarterly Review of Biology
Clive Gamble picks up the project of interrogating academic explanations of the past...[His] study is impressive...The material of this book is exciting; Gamble has fruitfully appropriated the metaphors of other disciplines, literary studies in particular, for his own purposes.
-- Noel Elizabeth Currie Canadian Literature
Why were people everywhere? Gamble offers an innovative look at how archaeologists use artifacts and human biological remains to answer this question and to describe how our human ancestors colonized the earth...[A] unique contribution.
-- Choice
The most innovative book on prehistory I have seen. Certainly the most thoughtful and comprehensive. A must-read for anybody interested in the real evidence for the evolution of human behavior--the prehistoric record.
-- Milford Wolpoff, University of Michigan
