Dragons' Teeth and Thunderstones The Quest for the Meaning of Fossils

About this book

For at least half a million years, people have been doing some very strange things with fossils. Long before a few 17th-century minds started to decipher their true, organic nature, fossils had been eaten, dropped in goblets of wine, buried with the dead, adorned on bodies and even used to try and cause harm. What triggered such curious behaviour was the belief, passed down from prehistoric to Medieval times, that some fossils could cure illness, protect against being poisoned, ease the passage into the afterlife, ward off evil spirits and even kill those who were just plain annoying. But above all, to our early prehistoric ancestors living hundreds of thousands of years ago, fossils were the very stuff of artistic inspiration.

Drawing on archaeology, mythology and folklore, Kenneth McNamara takes you on a journey through prehistory with these strange and curious stones, and explores humankind's unending quest for the meaning of fossils.

Contents

1 A Timeless Obsession
2 In the Myths of Time
3 The Stuff of Legends
4 Fashioning the Stone
5 Delighting the Mind
6 Saving the Soul
7 Protecting the Body
8 Curing the Body
9 The Dark Side
10 A Joke of Time
Epilogue

References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Kenneth J. McNamara is a palaeontologist and former Director of the Sedgwick Museum in the University of Cambridge. He is an Emeritus Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge and Adjunct Professor at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of several books, including Shapes of Time (1996), The Star-Crossed Stone (2011) and, with John Long, The Evolution Revolution (2007). Like his Palaeolithic ancestors he enjoys collecting fossils.