Here are 60 books that Europe's Lost World fans have personally recommended if you like
Europe's Lost World.
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Growing up in post-WWII Europe, young people’s anxiety was often channelled into searching for ‘lost worlds’, places hope could be nurtured and ancient solutions revived. So I encountered Atlantis and Lemuria and other imagined places but also learned, from training as a geologist, that once-populated lands had actually been submerged. Myths and legends often contain grains of observational truth at their heart. The more ‘submergence stories’ I research, from Australia through India and across northwest Europe, the more I realize how much we have forgotten about undersea human pasts. And how our navigation of the future could be improved by understanding them.
One of the first books written about scientific discoveries of Cities in the Sea was this by Nic Flemming and it is a great read. Impassioned, exciting, personal, you cannot fail to be swept along as the author describes his discovery of Pavlopetri, still acknowledged as the world’s earliest-known underwater city. Written before the world knew about climate change, this book is not in any sense forward-looking but rather a celebration of the discovery of once-inhabited undersea places that lit the way ahead for a whole generation of people curious about human pasts.
Growing up in post-WWII Europe, young people’s anxiety was often channelled into searching for ‘lost worlds’, places hope could be nurtured and ancient solutions revived. So I encountered Atlantis and Lemuria and other imagined places but also learned, from training as a geologist, that once-populated lands had actually been submerged. Myths and legends often contain grains of observational truth at their heart. The more ‘submergence stories’ I research, from Australia through India and across northwest Europe, the more I realize how much we have forgotten about undersea human pasts. And how our navigation of the future could be improved by understanding them.
Sometimes English readers are never exposed to histories in other languages but I feel personally indebted to Sumathi Ramaswamy for this monumental scientific study of Tamil traditions about the ‘lost land’ of Kumari Kandam. It is not merely comprehensive but leads its reader through Tamil literature and poetry to express the profundity of loss associated with this land’s submergence. Which may conceivably have informed western stories about Lemuria in the Indian Ocean.
During the nineteenth century, Lemuria was imagined as a land that once bridged India and Africa but disappeared into the ocean millennia ago, much like Atlantis. A sustained meditation on a lost place from a lost time, this elegantly written book is the first to explore Lemuria's incarnations across cultures, from Victorian-era science to Euro-American occultism to colonial and postcolonial India. The Lost Land of Lemuria widens into a provocative exploration of the poetics and politics of loss to consider how this sentiment manifests itself in a fascination with vanished homelands, hidden civilizations, and forgotten peoples. More than a consideration…
Growing up in post-WWII Europe, young people’s anxiety was often channelled into searching for ‘lost worlds’, places hope could be nurtured and ancient solutions revived. So I encountered Atlantis and Lemuria and other imagined places but also learned, from training as a geologist, that once-populated lands had actually been submerged. Myths and legends often contain grains of observational truth at their heart. The more ‘submergence stories’ I research, from Australia through India and across northwest Europe, the more I realize how much we have forgotten about undersea human pasts. And how our navigation of the future could be improved by understanding them.
In the late 1990s when this book was published, it seems no scientist had ever given serious thought to the consequences for human evolution of the submergence of Sundaland in the aftermath of the last ice age. There is compelling scientific evidence, compiled and analyzed here in compendious detail, that Sundaland was a heartland of human innovation and that its drowning may have led to the spread of rice agriculture, pottery making, and even tales of lands being ‘fished up’ (as by the Pacific demigod Maui). An astonishing read that today I still regard as largely credible.
At the end of the Ice Age, Southeast Asia formed a continent twice the size of India. The South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and the Java Sea, which were all dry, formed the connecting parts of the continent. Geologically, this half-sunken continent is the Sunda shelf of Sundaland. In Eden in the East Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in Southeast Asia was the cradle of civilisation that fertilised the great cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Crete six thousand years ago. He produces evidence from ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, from Creation stories, myths and…
Growing up in post-WWII Europe, young people’s anxiety was often channelled into searching for ‘lost worlds’, places hope could be nurtured and ancient solutions revived. So I encountered Atlantis and Lemuria and other imagined places but also learned, from training as a geologist, that once-populated lands had actually been submerged. Myths and legends often contain grains of observational truth at their heart. The more ‘submergence stories’ I research, from Australia through India and across northwest Europe, the more I realize how much we have forgotten about undersea human pasts. And how our navigation of the future could be improved by understanding them.
Written in the 1950s by a museum curator-geologist, Sunken Cities is one of the earliest expositions of ‘myth and legend’ and their plausible geological meanings. The author marries his deep knowledge of Welsh traditions about submerged places with contemporary geological understandings. Of course, geology was transformed the following decade but North’s book remains insightful and grounded in ways that many more recent accounts are not. If I lived in Wales, I would be off every weekend with it in hand!
I’m an accidental historian, one that stumbled over a love of history in spite of myself. In school, history was all just dates and places—not the kind of thing to inspire a kid that loved stories about people, not dusty old battles. But then a funny thing happened on the way to an English degree. A few history electives suddenly seemed way more appealing than another round of Austen, and led me to a BA History with Distinction. The first half of the twentieth century is a favorite period, but I say bring on the Renaissance and Viking ships too!
In The Inheritors, William Golding brings to life a creature from the distant past: Lok, a hairy, barely verbal hominid whose small band is the last of their kind. New words and thoughts confuse him, flashes of logic slip out of his grasp, and he discovers the existence of mysterious Others; invaders with the formidable technology of bow and arrow. But The Inheritorsis much morethan an exciting adventure. The story stays with me because Lok is a mirror of us—of the human urge to try, to fail, to push on despite the odds. We have no idea what the next thousand years will hold. Neither did Lok. But just like him, we can’t help moving forward.
Hunt, trek, and feast among Neanderthals in this stunning novel by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies, introduced by Ben Okri.
This was a different voice; not the voice of the people. It was the voice of other.
When spring comes, the people leave their winter cave, foraging for honey, grubs, and the hot richness of a deer's brain. They awaken the fire to heat their naked bodies, lay down their thorn bushes, and share pictures in their minds. But strange things are happening: inexplicable scents and sounds. Imaginable beasts are half-glimpsed in the forest;…
I've been fond of the Homeric poems since my youth. I followed classical studies in the high here in Rome, so I studied Latin and Greek before graduating in nuclear engineering. Then, in addition to my professional activity, I've devoted myself to the study of The Iliad and the Odyssey, with their huge contradictions between geography and their traditional Mediterranean setting. The book I published on this topic was translated and published into eight foreign languages (as The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales), and has given rise to many scientific discussions. I also published The Mysteries of the Megalithic Civilization, a Bestseller here in Italy.
This important volume traces a picture of European prehistory, from the earliest agricultural communities of the Neolithic period to the Roman world. Stuart Piggott, who was a great English scholar of the twentieth century, guides us here to understand the ancient roots of facts and situations that have gradually evolved up to the history we know well.
‘Ancient Europe’ is a readable and copiously illustrated account of man’s material, social, and cultural growth, from the sixth millennium B.C. until the incorporation of much of barbarian Europe within the Roman Empire. Professor Piggott brings together for the first time the scattered archeological evidence for this entire period and presents an up-to-date and comprehensive synthesis of the main lines of the European prehistory. Distinguished by authority and clarity of presentation, the book traces the beginnings of animal domestication and plan cultivation in ancient Western Asia, studies the transmission of these skills (by population movements and assimilation) to the European…
I've been fond of the Homeric poems since my youth. I followed classical studies in the high here in Rome, so I studied Latin and Greek before graduating in nuclear engineering. Then, in addition to my professional activity, I've devoted myself to the study of The Iliad and the Odyssey, with their huge contradictions between geography and their traditional Mediterranean setting. The book I published on this topic was translated and published into eight foreign languages (as The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales), and has given rise to many scientific discussions. I also published The Mysteries of the Megalithic Civilization, a Bestseller here in Italy.
In this book, an important 20th-century archaeologist reconstructs the life of prehistoric populations in the second millennium BC. Therefore, for those who are interested in this subject, it represents an important tool to better deepen a historical period whose knowledge is currently undergoing great evolution and which in the future could give us many surprises.
I am a holistic adult and child psychiatrist, astrologer, shamanic practitioner, and energy healer who has been in practice for 35 years. I am thoroughly familiar with the conventional paradigm for treating psychiatric illness, but I no longer endorse it and, in fact, believe that it causes harm. I am convinced that there is an urgent need for a paradigm shift in medicine at this time of collapse and breakdown on the planet. The sacred's vital role in healing needs to be acknowledged, as does the role of nutrition and lifestyle, as well as a need to identify and treat the root causes of illness rather than simply suppressing symptoms with pharmaceuticals.
Dr. Terry Wahls is an absolutely brilliant physician whose accessible book describes a treatment approach that is enormously effective for treating the inflammation that is at the heart of so many conditions. She reversed her own illness with it. She had rapidly progressive degeneration of her nervous system due to multiple sclerosis, which resulted in her needing to use a wheelchair. Through implementing her own protocol, she is now back to riding her bike.
I recommend this book to 95% of the patients in my practice because the dietary approach that she clearly describes makes such a difference in their health and well-being. I like the fact that she outlines three stages of implementing her protocol so that a person can begin with the least restrictive and, if desired, can take it to the next level.
This approach offers flexibility and allows a person to ease into making lifestyle changes.…
The cookbook companion to the groundbreaking The Wahls Protocol, featuring delicious, nutritionally dense recipes tailored to each level of the Wahls Paleo Diet.
The Wahls Protocol has become a sensation, transforming the lives of people who suffer from autoimmune disorders. Now, in her highly anticipated follow-up, Dr. Wahls is sharing the essential Paleo-inspired recipes her readers need to reduce and often eliminate their chronic pain, fatigue, brain fog, and other symptoms related to autoimmune problems, neurological diseases, and other chronic conditions, even when physicians have been unable to make a specific diagnosis. Packed with easy-to-prepare meals based on Dr. Wahls’s…
I was first a biologist, working with endangered species. Then I switched and spent fifteen years making nature documentaries with people like Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough. Then a humpback whale breached onto me when I was kayaking, this led to a life-changing adventure culminating in my becoming involved in efforts to use AI to translate the communications of whales! I wrote about this for my first book. My great passion was always reading and in becoming a writer I get to go deeper and more playfully into my favorite parts of filmmaking – following heroic and fascinating people on their adventures, reading hundreds of complicated scientific papers, and finding ways to connect these.
This was one of those books that as I got past the halfway point I became sad as I realised I was heading towards the ending.
Set in prehistory, this book follows a young apprentice shaman making his way in a small hunter-gatherer band. I've never read a book that does such a good job of helping me live in my mind outside of our modern civilsation and with something approaching the view of the rest of the living world that our ancestors may have had.
'Vivid and beautiful . . . Astonishing' - Guardian
'A thrilling journey through an age of ice and stone - one of Kim Stanley Robinson's best!' - Greg Bear
An award-winning and bestselling SF writer, Kim Stanley Robinson is widely acknowledged as one of the most exciting and visionary writers in the field. His latest novel, 2312, imagined how we would be living 300 years from now.
Now, with his new novel, he turns from our future to our past - to the Palaeolithic era, and an extraordinary moment in humanity's development. An emotionally powerful and richly detailed portrayal of…
I’m a professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics with affiliations in developmental economics and data science. Before that, I was at Harvard in Human Evolutionary Biology. During my PhD, I took graduate courses in psychology, economics, evolutionary biology, and statistics. I have undergraduate degrees in engineering and in psychology and took courses in everything from economics and biology to philosophy and political science. As a child, I witnessed the civil war in Sri Lanka; a violent coup in Papua New Guinea; the end of apartheid in South Africa, living in neighboring Botswana; and London’s 7/7 bomb attacks. I’ve also lived in Australia, Canada, USA, and UK.
The new science of DNA reveals a lot about how we think about identity.
Humans are a migratory species and our stories are complicated. Ancient DNA don't always match people's stories about their ancestors. Rather than being in a place for thousands of years, sometimes we replaced those who were there before or only the males of the group.
Sometimes we completely replaced the group that was there before but the original group's culture persisted or even replaced the invading culture. The book complicates our understanding of indigeneity and belonging.
The past few years have witnessed a revolution in our ability to obtain DNA from ancient humans. This important new data has added to our knowledge from archaeology and anthropology, helped resolve long-existing controversies, challenged long-held views, and thrown up remarkable surprises.
The emerging picture is one of many waves of ancient human migrations, so that all populations living today are mixes of ancient ones, and often carry a genetic component from archaic humans. David Reich, whose team has been at the forefront of these discoveries, explains what genetics is telling us about ourselves and our complex and often surprising…
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