Book: Look Inside the Stone Age (Usborne)

Look inside the Stone Age is a book in the popular Usborne "Lift the Flaps" series - although the content is aimed at primary school children doing the KS2 "Stone to Iron" module, it feels like an over-grown board book to hold with only six thick pages. Each of the seven spreads contains a detailed and colourful edge-to-edge illustration of a different topic, packed with people doing things. The topics covered are "The Stone Age", "Making tools", "Keeping warm" (shelters), "Art and beliefs", "The first farmers" (12,000 years ago), "Metal working" (5,000 years ago) and "The Iron Age" (3,000 years ago).

The book has "over 70 flaps to lift" which help to deliver short facts about things that are happening in the pictures: e.g. "There were some Stone Age animals that don't exist today": under the flap are pictures of a mammoth, aurochs, cave lion and cave bear, with a human pointing a spear at the aurochs worriedly.

I think that this book is worth using with a primary school child because it is attractive and contains a lot of information hidden in the pictures: it is a good book to look at together to start conversations. The dates given for the periods are earlier than those periods began in Britain, which is because they have gone by the dates for the innovations starting to appear in the Eurasian archaeological record. Likewise, in grouping by topic things from different times and places are shown adjacently, although the first farmers spread is an attempt to show how that commitment brought cultural change in many ways.

I'm slightly confused about some of the illustration choices - there has obviously been a lot of thought put into flap design and showing men holding babies and women leading (etc), but yet apparently everyone in the past has pale skin, rosy cheeks and brown hair despite most of the earliest metal technologies spreading west across Europe from Asia, and on the faith page for some reason all women wear knee-length skirts and tops and all men wear trousers (not the case elsewhere).