The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520266704)

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.

Author: Dean Falk
ISBN-10: 0520266706
ISBN-13: 9780520266704
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 10/03/2011
Pages: 280
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.16lbs
Size: 9.13h x 6.38w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/19/2011
Foreword 11/18/2011
Choice 04/01/2012