A Pocket History of Human Evolution: How We Became Sapiens

Author: Silvana Condemi
Publisher: The Experiment, LLC
ISBN: 1615196056
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
Why aren’t we more like other apes? How did we win the evolutionary race? Find out how “wise” Homo sapiens really are. Prehistory has never been more exciting: New discoveries are overturning long-held theories left and right. Stone tools in Australia date back 65,000 years—a time when, we once thought, the first Sapiens had barely left Africa. DNA sequencing has unearthed a new hominid group—the Denisovans—and confirmed that crossbreeding with them (and Neanderthals) made Homo sapiens who we are today. A Pocket History of Human Evolution brings us up-to-date on the exploits of all our ancient relatives. Paleoanthropologist Silvana Condemi and science journalist François Savatier consider what accelerated our evolution: Was it tools, our “large” brains, language, empathy, or something else entirely? And why are we the sole survivors among many early bipedal humans? Their conclusions reveal the various ways ancient humans live on today—from gossip as modern “grooming” to our gendered division of labor—and what the future might hold for our strange and unique species.

A Pocket History of Human Evolution

Author: Silvana Condemi
Publisher: The Experiment
ISBN: 1615196048
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

A Story of Us

Author: Lesley Newson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190883227
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
It's time for a story of human evolution that goes beyond describing "ape-men" and talks about what women and children were doing. In a few decades, a torrent of new evidence and ideas about human evolution has allowed scientists to piece together a more detailed understanding of what went on thousands and even millions of years ago. We now know much more about the problems our ancestors faced, the solutions they found, and the trade-offs they made. The drama of their experiences led to the humans we are today: an animal that relies on a complex culture. We are a species that can and does rapidly evolve cultural solutions as we face new problems, but the intricacies of our cultures mean that this often creates new challenges. Our species' unique capacity for culture began to evolve millions of years ago, but it only really took off in the last few hundred thousand years. This capacity allowed our ancestors to survive and raise their difficult children during times of extreme climate chaos. Understanding how this has evolved can help us understand the cultural change and diversity that we experience today. Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson, a husband-and-wife team based at the University of California, Davis, began their careers with training in biology. The two have spent years together and individually researching and collaborating with scholars from a wide range of disciplines to produce a deep history of humankind. In A Story of Us, they present this rich narrative and explain how the evolution of our genes relates to the evolution of our cultures. Newson and Richerson take readers through seven stages of human evolution, beginning seven million years ago with the apes that were the ancestors of humans and today's chimps and bonobos. The story ends in the present day and offers a glimpse into the future.

Summary of Silvana Condemi & François Savatier's A Pocket History of Human Evolution

Author: Everest Media
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN: 1669350592
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 23

Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Humans are classified as a genus, or group, of animal species called Homo. We are also classified as sapiens, which means wise. We are the only existing human form. #2 The hominid family includes humans, bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. We have discovered many fossils of prehuman ancestors, such as Ardipithecus, Paranthropus, and Australopithecus, which are more closely related to us than they are to chimpanzees. #3 The hominin family tree actually looks more like a bush, which shows that hominins passed through a series of significant evolutionary stages, periods during which several related species possessed nearly the same body type and lifestyles. #4 The first stage in the evolution of human bipedalism was the transition from arboreal quadruped to imperfect bipedalism, meaning that these hominins were capable of walking on two legs but still remained arboreal.

Human Evolution

Author: Bernard A. Wood
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198831749
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
The study of human evolution is advancing rapidly. New fossil evidence is adding ever more pieces to the puzzle of our past; the new science of ancient DNA is completely reshaping theories of early human populations and migrations. Bernard Wood traces the field of palaeoanthropology from its beginnings in the eighteenth century to the present.

Mothers and Others

Author: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674659953
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution. Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. Mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not. From its opening vision of “apes on a plane”; to descriptions of baby care among marmosets, chimpanzees, wolves, and lions; to explanations about why men in hunter-gatherer societies hunt together, Mothers and Others is compellingly readable. But it is also an intricately knit argument that ever since the Pleistocene, it has taken a village to raise children—and how that gave our ancient ancestors the first push on the path toward becoming emotionally modern human beings.

Evolution

Author: Peter J. Bowler
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520261283
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 493

Book Description
Since its original publication in 1989, Evolution: The History of an Idea has been recognized as a comprehensive and authoritative source on the development and impact of this most controversial of scientific theories. This twentieth anniversary edition is updated with a new preface examining recent scholarship and trends within the study of evolution.

Mind the Gap

Author: Richard G. Wilkinson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300089530
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 92

Book Description
Inequality kills. Both rich and poor die younger in countries with the greatest inequalities in income. Countries such as the United States with big gaps between rich and poor have higher death rates than those with smaller gaps such as Sweden and Japan. Why? In this provocative book, Richard Wilkinson provides a novel Darwinian approach to the question. Wilkinson points out that inequality is new to our species: in our two-million-year history, human societies became hierarchical only about ten thousand years ago. Because our minds and bodies are adapted to a more egalitarian life, today's hierarchical structures may be considered unnatural. To people at the bottom of the heap, the world seems hostile and the stress is harmful. If you are not in control, you're at risk. This is a penetrating analysis of patterns of health and disease that has implications for social policy. Wilkinson concludes that rather than relying on more police, prisons, social workers, or doctors, we must tackle the corrosive social effects of income differences in our society.

The Complete World of Human Evolution

Author: Chris Stringer
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781973896715
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
The Complete World of Human Evolution By Chris Stringer

The Evolution of the Human Head

Author: Daniel Lieberman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674046366
Category : MEDICAL
Languages : en
Pages : 769

Book Description
Exhaustively researched and years in the making, this innovative book documents how the many components of the head function, how they evolved since we diverged from the apes, and how they interact in diverse ways both functionally and developmentally, causing them to be highly integrated. This integration not only permits the head's many units to accommodate each other as they grow and work, but also facilitates evolutionary change. Lieberman shows how, when, and why the major transformations evident in the evolution of the human head occurred. The special way the head is integrated, Lieberman argues, made it possible for a few developmental shifts to have had widespread effects on craniofacial growth, yet still permit the head to function exquisitely. --