This dynamic chronicle of the race to find the "missing links" between humans and apes transports readers into the highly competitive world of fossil hunting and into the lives of the ambitious scientists intent on pinpointing the dawn of humankind. The quest to find where and when the earliest human ancestors first appeared is one of the most exciting and challenging of all scientific pursuits. The First Human is the story of four international teams...

"When Darwin proposed that humans evolved from a common ancestor with the great apes, he lacked fossil evidence to support his idea. One hundred and fifty years later, the evidence for human evolution is plentiful and growing, including detailed molecular genetics data, an impressive fossil record, and artifacts of early human culture like stone tools. In four presentations, leading scientists John Shea of Stony Brook University, Sarah Tishkoff of...

In Kindred, Neanderthal expert Rebecca Wragg Sykes shoves aside the cliché of the shivering ragged figure in an icy wasteland, and reveals the Neanderthal you don't know, our ancestor who lived across vast and diverse tracts of Eurasia and survived through hundreds of thousands of years of massive climate change. This book sheds new light on where they lived, what they ate, and the increasingly complex Neanderthal culture that researchers have discovered....

"Fossil Men is the riveting science-adventure story of the brilliant team who discovered the "Ardi" skeleton, a human more than a million years older than the famous Lucy, and their 20-year quest to redefine our understanding of human evolution"--

Dr. King has spent 22 years on the cutting-edge of biological anthropology, not just in the academy but on the plains of Kenya at Amboseli National Park, where she studied baboons, and as a researcher of lowland gorillas at the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park. She has taught at The College of William and Mary since 1988 and has won teaching awards, including William and Mary's Thomas Jefferson Teaching Award and the Virginia State Council of...

"A science historian describes seven famous ancestral fossils that have become known around the world, including the three-foot tall "hobbit" from Flores, the Neanderthal of La Chapelle, the Taung Child, the Piltdown Man hoax, Peking Man, Australopithecus sediba and Lucy,"--NoveList "Over the last century, the search for human ancestors has spanned four continents and resulted in the discovery of hundreds of fossils. Most of these discoveries live...

By the nationally best-selling author of The Seven Daughters of Eve, Adam's Curse investigates the ultimate evolutionary crisis: a man-free future. How is it possible that the Y chromosome, which separated the sexes and allowed humans to rise to the apex of the animal kingdom, also threatens to destroy sexual reproduction altogether? Bryan Sykes confronts recent advances in evolutionary theory to find the answers to the questions that inexorably follow:...

Based on a lifetime of pioneering research, preeminent naturalist Edward O. Wilson gives us a new history of human evolution, presented in an elegant and provocative narrative that promises to have reverberations in fields as diverse as anthropology and social psychology, neuroscience and 21st-century intellectual and religious history. Wilson begins by addressing three "fundamental questions" of religion and philosophy that have fascinated thinkers...