Message #83799

[Bianca]

                                            Çatalhöyük: a Stone Age city 
 




If you start spouting terms like Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic over the average dinner table, chances are eyes will glaze over and someone will seek to change the direction of conversation by asking you to "Pass the salt, please."

 
 
Use the more populist term for this lengthy period (in excess of half a million years) in mankind's development -- the Stone Age -- and you may well get more interest.

To men of a certain age images of the voluptuous Raquel Welch, star of the 1960s "so bad it's good" movie "One Million Years B.C." may well spring to mind. Clad in nothing more than a skimpy fur bikini,
the statuesque Welch fled the unwanted attentions of ugh-ughing Neanderthal men and rampaging dinosaurs with a reckless disregard to the period (Neanderthal man became extinct tens of thousands
of years before 1 million B.C. and dinosaurs 65 million years ago).

Hannah-Barbara's cartoon classic "The Flintstones" left many a '60s child with the firm impression
that
in the Stone Age (so called because in this period man used stone tools and weapons rather than metal) people called Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble commuted to work in stone-wheeled cars,
drove home to watch stone TV sets and petted dinosaurs instead of dogs. But the kind of popular entertainment that peddled such patent (if entertaining) nonsense did reflect a genuine and bur-
geoning popular interest in how mankind developed.