This course deserves a high rating for the quality of the instructor, but it has some serious flaws which reduces my rating to (a perhaps generous) 3***.

• It's roughly twenty years old and isn't really up-to-date on Neanderthals. More recent research contradicts the instructor's assertion that Home Sapiens Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens Sapiens could not interbreed. In fact, current DNA research indicates that all human races share some small percentage of Neanderthal genes (with the exception of sub-Saharan Africans, since Neanderthals developed outside of the African continent). Additionally, Neanderthals (despite this instructor's now-dated assertion) were in fact artistic and apparently had some form of spirituality.
• The instructor's assertion (and granted, he's an archaeologist, not a linguist) that Indo-Aryan more likely developed in India rather than being imported to the subcontinent by migrants is, to say the least, a minority view – one that I tend to associate with the Hindutva movement.
• His contrast between Brahmanism and Buddhism in India ignores the important role of folk religions, especially among pre-Aryan inhabitants of the subcontinent.
• Although this isn't entirely a "talking head" video and there are some illustrations, there could have been more.
• The close captioning is often sloppy, not coordinating well with the spoken word.

All told, 3***; and I'd recommend paging through the Great Courses library for more current versions of this topic. ( )

A fairly light course/audiobook (if it's college-level as advertised, it's 1st year stuff at most).

This lightness is, as one might guess, due to the breadth of topics. Millions of years of prehistory and coverage of many early civilizations insures shallowness. Since buckets of ink have been spilt on books on various civilizations, I think a better strategy would have been to have omitted the early civilizations stuff and focused on the more rapidly advancing field of prehistory and human evolution.

Fagan lectures from an eurocentric point of view. Understandable perhaps, but it nonetheless is annoying at times. Frequent references, for example, to the 1st century CE to "the time of Christ" add nothing and are probably a turn off to some. Calling the Spaniards who decimated the civilizations of the Americas "adventurers", as if they were just some guys looking for fun times, left a bad taste in my mouth.

Finally, at 10 years old, some of the information is starting to show its age. Significant advances and discoveries in paleogenetics, archaeology, and historical linguistics have occurred in the decade since this course.

So, in the end, it's probably worth it as an introduction, modulo the datedness, but for serious information find something more specific and current. ( )

A lecture series about the development of prehistoric humans and their transition in the the earliest civilizations. I really liked it when he would make a statement about something and then say, "How do we know this?" and then describe how the physical evidence is used to shed light on these peoples. ( )

I'm not sure why these lectures are described as college-level. They cannot be more basic or cursory, and there isn't much need for any thinking or understanding on the listener's part. Young children can follow this as long as they are interested.

The professor is just ridiculous in his delivery. I guess he's trying to make it more interesting, but his performance is completely over the top.

I found the prehistoric parts extremely fascinating. The civilization stories, however, are basically variations of
-They lived here at that time
-They traded this with that
-They prospered under the flamboyant, able ruler x and declined under the weak ruler y and/or natural disaster/event z. (Every "able" ruler is flamboyant, but not defined in any other way. "Weak" is also never defined.)

There is almost no cultural, social, or linguistic analysis.

Unless a specific civilization is of interest to you, I'd recommend skipping all of them. Remember the epilogue, it's one of the better lectures. ( )

Wonderful audio course. I think it's the best one I've had from the Teaching Company. The first part was hominid ancestors, human paleontology and human migration patterns out of Africa. That was fascinating and I read a lot of interesting books from the bibliography. Little did I know that Professor Fagan was just warming up. His review of what we know about the first civilizations gave me lots of new insights, especially at how vulnerable humans are to things like climate change, but how tenacious we are in the face of adversity. I highly recommend this course. (I'll warn you that Professor Fagan has a small speech impediment that takes a couple of lessons to filter out. This course is too good to let a little thing like that deter you. Just listen until you get used to it.) ( )