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Book Review
Fun and even entertaining: the book that offers an unconventional acquaintance with the strange creatures that once lived here
Despite some really small stumbles, "Were Here Before Us" by Eyal Halfon and Ran Barkai presents a wealth of "dry" scientific facts and findings about more and less upright human species that lived tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago, in an accessible, relatively easy-to-understand and even spicy way.
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Book review
Eyal Halfon
Yuval Noah Harari
Neanderthals
Cow history
Udi Ben Saadia
Tuesday, 10 August 2021, 08:11
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We have to admit the truth: it's hard to say 'no' to a book whose first pages take place about a mile and a half from where you were born and raised, and that's exactly what happens in the screenwriter and film director's were here before us' - and also a graduate in geology at Tel Aviv University!
- Eyal Halfon ("Palestine Circus", "Cup Final") and Prof. Ran Barkai, who researches and teaches in the Department of Archeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University: This is a book that begins on the banks of the Jordan River .
Seemingly, it is possible today to gather all the information about Tel Ovadia online as a skilled hunter, but here, for example, you will meet the place through the eyes of Izzy Marimsky, a member of Kibbutz Afikim and a graduate of Kadouri Agricultural School. Name the monarchy: a strange variety of pottery and even deer antlers. To this day, when he is over 80, he remembers with passion and excitement how he packed all the finds he discovered in several wooden crates, and sent them to Prof. Moshe Shtaklis (husband of the poet Miriam Yellen Shtaklis) from the Prehistoric Archeology Section at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The latter immediately realized that this was a sensational discovery and immediately hurried to the valley, along with some of the other best experts and senior geologists in Israel.
And here in the first pages we manage to grasp the principle that guides Halfon and Barkai: the variety of "dry" scientific facts and findings about Homo erectus (the upright person), and the Homo bilis (the talented person) and other more upright and less upright human species, are presented to the reader in an accessible way , Relatively easy to understand and digest, and no less important and perhaps even more so - in a way spiced with quite a bit of humor.
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A smart and fun book.
Barkai and Halfon (Photo: Sasha Fleet, Nadine Perkovsky)
Each episode is a kind of "digging in depth" at a different site, all around the country and all of them actually not that far from each other.
Each such chapter is, among other things, a kind of undisguised public relations campaign for strange creatures like the Neanderthal man who lived here for hundreds of thousands of years, about 400,000 years ago to 40,000 years ago.
I said public relations to create less popular and familiar, perhaps because the successor of Neanderthal man, Homo sapiens (the thinking man or the wise man), probably gained an extreme dose of public relations with the appearance of the hysterical bestseller of historian Yuval Noah Harari, "A Brief History of Mankind."
In a boxed article it can be said that the well-intentioned bites of the two authors in this book cannot be missed towards the resolute assertions that have been made regarding the time of the appearance of that gay-spence in Harari's book.
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Back to Kursawa
And perhaps one can look at this book from another, enviable point it must be said, in a chapter which tells of a French prehistorian named Jean-Claude who was also the Chief Inspector of Archeology of France. On New Year’s Eve almost 30 years ago, just moments before he was about to go on a family vacation, he got a cave-loving phone call called Jean-Marie Shuva telling him he had to leave everything and come see something.
Jean-Claude traveled nearly 400 miles on mountainous, winding roads to sneak into a cave, even without a helmet and coat, and to discover a spectacular panel of horse-heads that had so excited him that "he had tears in his eyes" and the first thing he did - and here comes the point What is really enviable, is to pick up the phone to the French Minister of Culture.
Yes.
I know, in the last year or so we have had another Minister of Culture here in our small country, but one like me, who was often at the forefront of the struggle against the previous Minister of Culture after me and my friends were declared "enemies of the people" more than once, can not help but feel intense envy .
That is: there is such a place in the world where the researcher, or artist, is on "one front" with the Minister of Culture of the country, so much so that the first thing he wants to do is simply pick up the phone of that Minister of Culture and share the great excitement that gripped him.
Each chapter is a kind of "digging in depth" on a different site (Photo: Dvir Publishing)
At this point as you probably already notice, I give up in advance any attempt to write a kind of ordinary "literary critique". I gave up on this challenge in advance and decided to just follow in the footsteps of Halfon and Barkai, and let the passion with which they write about things come and conquer me as well. So if you want to know, for example, when humans started burying their dead, and alternatively who is the woman for whom they did not dismantle the Palmach, but dismantled ninety turtles from their armor - stop reading here and go find this clever and fun book. (I'm a little allergic to sentences sometimes like we spent "A Wonderful Week in Paradise Landscapes") This is a really successful book.
Since Eyal Halfon and I studied together somewhere in the early 1980s (he is a filmmaker, I am a theater) An unforgettable one from one of my favorite movies, and the reference is to the ending image of the movie "Dreams",Perhaps the most personal film of the well-known Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa.
In this scene, the funeral procession marches around the small village, and near the spring an old man joins him with drums and cymbals in his hands, to what suddenly looks like his own funeral procession.
In moments when the anxiety is not too great, I too would like to simulate the journey in this way - moving between the paths of the village where I grew up, holding drums and cymbals in my hand and slowly being absorbed and administered within all the dear people who were here before us.
"We were here before us" by Eyal Halfon and Ran Barkai.
Kinneret Zmora Dvir Publishing.
216 pages
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