The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution / Edition 1

by Dean Falk

Overview

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 skull from South Africa that led anatomist Raymond Dart to argue that this creature had walked upright and that Africa held the key to the fossil ancestry of our species. The second find consisted of the partial skeleton of a three-and-a-half-foot-tall woman, nicknamed Hobbit, from Flores Island, Indonesia. She is thought by scientists to belong to a new, recently extinct species of human, but her story is still unfolding. Falk, who has studied the brain casts of both Taung and Hobbit, reveals new evidence crucial to interpreting both discoveries and proposes surprising connections between this pair of extraordinary specimens.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520274464
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/03/2011
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Dean Falk is a Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her previous books include Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origin of Language and Braindance, Revised and Expanded Edition: New Discoveries about Human Origins and Brain Evolution.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Of Paleopolitics and Missing Links
2. Taung: A Fossil to Rival Piltdown
3. Taung’s Checkered Past
4. Sulcal Skirmishes
5. Once upon a Hobbit
6. Flo’s Little Brain
7. Sick Hobbits, Quarrelsome Scientists
8. Whence Homo floresiensis?
9. Bones to Pick

Notes
Glossary
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Brilliant. . . . Sparkles with scholarship and wit."—Nature

"The book is part historical drama, part neurological crash course and part autobiography . . . . The combination is refreshing."—Wall Street Journal

Editorial Reviews

Infectious. . . . This book provides a powerful reminder that fossils should hold value to those beyond sometimes argumentative paleoanthropologists.

Qtly Review Of Biology - Kristian J. Carlson

"Engaging and compelling. . . . Effective and affecting."

Reports of the National Center for Science Education - Andrew Kramer

“The book is part historical drama, part neurological crash course and part autobiography . . . . The combination is refreshing.

Wall Street Journal

“Brilliant. . . . Sparkles with scholarship and wit.

Nature

Falk, an anthropologist with the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, N.M., explores two key discoveries and the fallout they caused among paleoanthropologists regarding their significance for human evolution: the Taung child in South Africa in 1924 and the skeleton nicknamed Hobbit, found on Flores Island, Indonesia, in 2004. The author, closely involved with the latter discovery, vividly captures the excitement of uncovering new knowledge and the passion scientists bring to their work, placing each find in the broader context of its day (doubts about Taung, for instance, followed from the 1912 Pilodown Man hoax), and examining what each find teaches us about ourselves and where we come from. Falk’s tone is conversational—regarding Hobbit, she quotes from her diary, “Yippee Skippee… She ain’t a microcephalic!” —but frequently gives way to dense passages of data. The book is most enlightening in its treatment of the personal politics and rivalries that accompany the scientific process, the internecine quarrels over the specifics of evolution even among scientists who agree on the theory’s broad outlines, and how “scientists… can be as emotionally invested in their explanations of human origins as religious fundamentalists are in theirs. After all, the topic literally entails matters of life and death.” 30 illus. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

The book is part historical drama, part neurological crash course and part autobiography . . . . The combination is refreshing.

Wall Street Journal

Brilliant. . . . Sparkles with scholarship and wit.

Nature Lib

"Brilliant. . . . Sparkles with scholarship and wit."--Nature

"The book is part historical drama, part neurological crash course and part autobiography . . . . The combination is refreshing."--Wall Street Journal

"Infectious. . . . This book provides a powerful reminder that fossils should hold value to those beyond sometimes argumentative paleoanthropologists."--Qtly Review of Biology

From the Publisher