By examining the remains of our forebears and their tools, archaeologists have discovered how resourceful and imaginative early man was at finding and cooking food. Indeed, their diet was far more varied than you might think.

In Prehistoric Cookery: Recipes & History (English Heritage, £7.99), Jane Renfrew reconstructs the diet of our prehistoric ancestors by looking at mounds of discarded seashells, bones of wild and domestic animals and the remains of plants.

Her ideas on how food would have been cooked come from the Bronze Age mounds of burnt stones found at several sites in the UK, which appear to have been cooking places.

Naturally, she is unable to provide instructions on how to cook a woolly mammoth such as the one pictured in the film Ice Age (above), but she does remind us that nothing was wasted. When an animal was killed everything was eaten udder, tripe, brains, tails and even gristle would be used in the absence of any alternatives.

Apart from nuts and grain, our ancestors would have used green shoots and possibly stinging nettles, tansy and dandelion leaves as well as honey. Beautifully illustrated and with 45 recipes, this delightful pocket-size book provides a fascinating background to the way early man managed to find food and create a meal as nourishing as anything we eat today.