About Roland Ennos
Roland Ennos is a visiting professor of biological sciences at the University of Hull. With his broad scientific knowledge and ability to make connections across disciplines, he is devoted to explaining how the world works for a general audience.
Among other things, he is an expert on the mechanics of wood and the design of trees. He has investigated how our fingers are modified for gripping. He has looked at how apes move about and make their nests in the forest canopy. He has studied how early humans used spear-throwers to increase projectile range, and how they designed better axes to cut down trees. He has lectured on how humans have managed and altered forests, and has had a life-long fascination for architecture and engineering.
In addition to writing over 120 scientific publications, he is the author of successful textbooks on plants, biomechanics, and statistics as well as the popular book Trees, originally published by the Natural History Museum in London. He has also written several popular articles on physics and biology for Physics World and a feature for the Conversation on keeping your house warm that has been read one-and-a-half million times. He has promoted his research through many appearances on national and international radio shows including BBC’s ‘Open Country’ and PBS’s ‘Science Friday’, made numerous appearances on local television, and gives talks on trees to natural history and gardening societies throughout the United Kingdom.
The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization
A groundbreaking examination of the role that wood and trees have played in our global ecosystem—including human evolution and the rise and fall of empires—in the bestselling tradition of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and Mark Kurlansky’s Salt.
As the dominant species on Earth, humans have made astonishing progress since our ancestors came down from the trees. But how did the descendants of small primates manage to walk upright, become top predators, and populate the world? How were humans able to develop civilizations and produce a globalized economy? Now, in The Age of Wood, Roland Ennos shows for the first time that the key to our success has been our relationship with wood.
Brilliantly synthesizing recent research with existing knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as primatology, anthropology, archaeology, history, architecture, engineering, and carpentry, Ennos reinterprets human history and shows how our ability to exploit wood’s unique properties has profoundly shaped our bodies and minds, societies, and lives.
He takes us on a sweeping ten-million-year journey from Southeast Asia and West Africa where great apes swing among the trees, builds nests, and fashion tools; to East Africa where hunter-gatherers collected their food; to the structural design of wooden temples in China and Japan; and to Northern England, where archaeologists trace how coal enabled humans to build an industrial world. Addressing the effects of industrialization—including the use of fossil fuels and other energy-intensive materials to replace timber—The Age of Wood not only shows the essential role that trees play in the history and evolution of human existence, but also argues that for the benefit of our planet we must return to more traditional ways of growing, using, and understanding trees.
A winning blend of history and science, this is a fascinating and authoritative work for anyone interested in nature, the environment, and the making of the world as we know it.
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