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  • The Wood Age

  • How one material shaped the whole of human History
  • By: Roland Ennos
  • Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
  • Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (27 ratings)

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The Wood Age

By: Roland Ennos
Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
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Summary

When our ancestors came down from the trees, they brought the trees with them and remade the world.

‘A stunning book on the incalculable debt humanity owes wood…’ John Carey, The Sunday Times

How did the descendants of small arboreal primates manage to stand on our own two feet, become top predators and take over the world?

In The Wood Age, Roland Ennos shows that the key to humanity’s success has been our relationship with wood. He takes us on a sweeping ten-million-year journey from great apes who built their nests among the trees to early humans who depended on wood for fire, shelter, tools and weapons; from the structural design of wheels and woodwinds, to the invention of paper and the printing press.

Drawing together recent research and reinterpreting existing evidence from fields as far-ranging as primatology, anthropology, archaeology, history, architecture, engineering and carpentry, Ennos charts for the first time how our ability to exploit wood’s unique properties has shaped our bodies and minds, societies and lives. He also charts the dislocating effects of industrialism and explains how rediscovering traditional ways of growing, using and understanding trees can help combat climate change and bring our lives into better balance with nature.

In the bestselling tradition of Harari’s Sapiens, this unique history of humanity tells the story of our evolution, our civilisations and our future through the lens of the material that made us. We are products of the Wood Age.

©2021 Roland Ennos (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History
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Critic reviews

"A stunning book on the incalculable debt humanity owes to wood.... Roland Ennos’s knowledge of all things arboreal is vast and intricate. He is a professor of biology at the University of Hull and the author of several books, among them the Natural History Museum’s official guide to trees. But The Wood Age is something different — nothing less than a complete reinterpretation of human history and prehistory, and it is written with enormous verve and pinpoint clarity.... No review can match the richness of Ennos’s book. There are chapters or sections on coal and charcoal, pottery kilns, modern wooden buildings, techniques of melting and smelting metals, the history of shipbuilding, wind and watermills, deforestation and much else.... I felt like cheering." (John Carey, The Sunday Times)

"Ennos, a professor at the University of Hull and a specialist in the mechanical properties of trees, shares his insatiable curiosity with us. He applies his sharp eye for details and he does so entertainingly." (Washington Post)

"[Ennos] takes a fresh look at the familiar substance, wielding it like a wedge to pry open our past, examine our present and even glimpse our future." (Wall Street Journal)

What listeners say about The Wood Age

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A journey to greater appreciation

Learning the story of Wood through time, has been really fascinating. It’s given me far greater appreciation of how our cultural development and opportunities were influenced by the quality of the forests around us.

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Excellent

Beautiful story of the evolution of humanity, illustrating how instrumental wood has been to making who we are today.

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A brilliant new look at our history

The wood age gave me a new perspective on our history and made it clear to me why a daily walk in the forest feel so good and why woodcrafting gives me a sence of ease and competence. Having taught history and woodwork among other subjects for forty years I was excited to learn something new on every page. The book provided knowledge that make me better understand the ecological and sosial problems we face in our time.
I would recomend it to politicoans, teatchers, cityplanners, arcitects and sosial workers for a start. And then to the rest of us.

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