The Little Ice Age
by Brian Fagan | 
The Code Book
by Simon Singh | 
The Botany of Desire
by Michael Pollan | 
The Gene: An Intimate History
by Siddhartha Mukherjee | 
A Man on the Moon
by Andrew Chaikin | 
The Sixth Extinction
by Elizabeth Kolbert | 
Cod
by Mark Kurlansky | 
The Disappearing Spoon
by Sam Kean | 
Salt
by Mark Kurlansky | 
The Johnstown Flood
by David McCullough | 
Hackers
by Steven Levy | 
Fingerprints of the Gods
by Graham Hancock | 
Magicians of the Gods
by Graham Hancock | 
The Demon in the Freezer
by Richard Preston | 
The Information
by James Gleick | 
Stuff Matters
by Mark Miodownik | 
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
by Steven Johnson | 
A History of the World in 6 Glasses
by Tom Standage | 
The Children's Blizzard
by David Laskin | 
How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
by Julian Guthrie |
Cro-Magnons were the first fully modern Europeans?not only the creators of the stunning cave paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere, but the most adaptable and technologically inventive people that had yet lived on earth. The prolonged encounter between the Cro-Magnons and the archaic Neanderthals and between 45,000 and 30,000 years ago was one of the defining moments of history. The Neanderthals survived for some 15,000 years in the face of the newcomers, but were finally pushed aside by the Cro-Magnons' vastly superior intellectual abilities and cutting-edge technologies, which allowed them to thrive in the intensely challenging climate of the Ice Age.