Any archaeologist has the ambition of making a major archaeological discovery that will greatly advance our knowledge of people and their way of life. João Zilhão is one of the few who can claim to have been at the heart of several remarkable discoveries that transformed our understanding of human evolution. Many of these discoveries were made on Portuguese soil and in this book Zilhão describes them with professional rigour, yet in a simple and engaging way. Reading it allows us to visualise the territory and inhabitants of Portugal during the Ice Age or Pleistocene, which began 2.6 million years ago (although the first humans found in Iberia date back to 800,000 years) and ended around 11,700 years ago, when the Holocene began. In the Ice Age, the environmental impact of the Homo genus would have been almost non-existent, if the demographic values inferred by the carrying capacity calculation are to be believed: in the period 30,000-12,500 years ago, Iberia would have had 90,000 people (a mere 15 inhabitants/100 km2, of which 13,500 would have been in Portugal); Italy would have had 30,000 people; and 20,000 would have lived on the great North European plain and 40,000 on the steppes of Ukraine and Russia. Lions, hyenas, rhinos and horses dominated in a wooded moorland landscape such as present-day Scotland. The numerous illustrations and photographs, most of them by the author himself, contribute to the exemplary quality of this reference book to learn about our past.