Additional information
by Naomi Walmsley (Author), Mia Underwood (Illustrator)
Live Like a Hunter Gatherer is an informative and immersive guide to the Stone Age, written by a real-life hunter gatherer!
If you imagined that all Stone Age people lived in caves, were not very clever, not very clean and said "Ugg" a lot, then think again. Marking the start of all human history, the Stone Age lasted around 3.5 million years (the last part of that was only 71 grandparents ago!). Delve into that incredible time with this book packed full of amazing facts, information, crafts, storytelling, and myth debunking to find out what it was really like to live as a hunter gatherer.
Many of our Stone Age ancestors' everyday needs were similar to ours including:
- How to keep warm
- Where to sleep
- What to eat and drink.
We find out how they met those needs, what a typical day was like, what medicine they used and even how they had fun - all brought to life with beautifully detailed illustrations.
Dotted through the book are step-by-step craft activities and recipes that give you first-hand experience of some vital Stone Age skills, making:
- A Mesolithic shelter
- Fat lamps
- A digging stick
- Cave art
- A bow and arrow
- A fishing hook
Are just a few! A fictional tribe member pops up throughout the book to tell us about her life, describing the sights, sounds, smells, and emotions she experiences. The safety of a warm cave with flickering firelight and other tribe members nearby, the gnawing feeling of hunger when food is scarce and the excited relief when a deer is hunted.
Author Biography
Naomi Walmsley and Dan Walmsley are a husband and wife team, they run Outback2Basics from their patch of woodland in Shropshire, UK. Specializing in bushcraft and Stone Age skills, they provide unique experiences for schoolchildren and teachers to connect to nature. Naomi is a qualified bushcraft instructor and Forest School Leader and believes that every child should be able to safely light a fire and have at least ten uses for a stick by the age of ten. She has also written for many magazines, including Bushcraft Survival Skills, LivingWoods and Juno.
So passionate are they about the Stone Age way of life, they have actually lived and breathed it for themselves. Naomi and Dan undertook a five-month Stone Age immersion experience in the US in 2010, living in the wilderness without any modern equipment, profoundly influencing their lives and teaching. In 2020, they appeared in Channel 4's fascinating documentary Surviving the Stone Age. A three-part series filmed in Bulgaria with six other Stone-Age experts living as a tribe of hunter gatherers for one month. Naomi has co-authored two previous books for GMC Publications Forest School Adventure and Urban Forest School.Mia Underwood is a designer and illustrator based in Brighton, UK. She loves a creative challenge and works with traditional and digital illustration as well as creating 3D characters. Being half Danish she particularly enjoys creating scenes with characters that conjure up the dreamlike and mysterious imaginary woodlands within Scandinavia.
