The popular view that Stone Age Man was primitive and ignorant is shattered as the author reveals the remarkable accomplishments made before the dawn of history. The journey begins in ancient Egypt, where excavations at Abydos have unearthed hieroglyphs belonging to an age before the pharaohs. It continues to stone circles and burial chambers in Ireland which carbon dating proves pre-date Stonehenge by two millennia, to the world's first town, 9,000-year-old Catal Huyuk in Turkey, and to startling new research on the Ice Man, the 5,000-year-old mummy found in an Alpine glacier. The author discusses 11,000-year-old writing unearthed on the banks of the Euphrates, awe-inspiring cave paintings of Ice Age France, and the discovery of stone tools in Indonesia that proves that pre-Neanderthal man undertook sea voyages 700,000 years before the Kon Tiki.