San Antonio College Library

A remarkable discovery was made a decade ago on a dig in northern Kenya. When all the bone and skull fragments were painstakingly pieced together, they revealed the nearly complete skeleton of a teenage male (nicknamed Nariokotome boy, after a nearby sand river). Faced with the best-ever specimen of Homo erectus - a species long identified as the proverbial missing link between apes and humans - paleoanthropologist Alan Walker embarked on a long-term...

In this book the author, a Harvard evolutionary biologist presents an account of how the human body has evolved over millions of years, examining how an increasing disparity between the needs of Stone Age bodies and the realities of the modern world are fueling a paradox of greater longevity and chronic disease. It illuminates the major transformations that contributed key adaptations to the body: the rise of bipedalism; the shift to a non-fruit-based...

Early humans did not move north gradually from their tropical homeland as they adapted to the cold, reports Hoffecker (Arctic and Alpine research, U. of Colorado-Boulder), but in relatively rapid bursts of expansion. Spanning two million years, his study describes the movement out of Africa, the first Europeans, cold weather people, modern humans in the north, moving into the Arctic, and peoples of the circumpolar zone. Annotation ©2004 Book News,...

"Who owns the past? Scientists are reconstructing human prehistory with ever more refined techniques at a time when Indigenous people are demanding ownership of it, and when many archaeologists are challenging the primacy of scientific evidence. 'The bone readers' examines the most controversial issues in Australian pre-history. With a razor sharp eye and a fine sense of irony, the authors explain which hypotheses don't have legs and expose the implications...

"Two discoveries of early human relatives, one in 1924 and one in 2003, radically changed scientific thinking about our origins. Dean Falk, a pioneer in the field of human brain evolution, offers this fast-paced insider's account of these discoveries, the behind-the-scenes politics embroiling the scientists who found and analyzed them, and the academic and religious controversies they generated. The first is the Taung child, a two-million-year-old...

This is a really good book on the history of paleoanthropology--the study of human origins. In fact, there may not be a better book on the market that does what Delisle (McGill Univ.) does in summarizing how the issues of human origin and evolution have been addressed in the years following Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Delisle organizes the discussion chronologically into ten chapters, with an introductory chapter that presents...

"In the fall of 1971, Jon Kalb, a young geologist from Texas, was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to explore Ethiopia's forbidding Afar Depression, long considered a kind of hell on earth." "Although it was geology that initially drew Kalb to the region, it was astounding archeological finds that became the reason to stay. The Afar yielded Lucy, the First Family, Bodo Man, the Aramis Skeleton, the Buri Skull, and some of the...