Product Description
Ever since the recognition of the Neanderthals as an archaic form of human in the mid-nineteenth century, the fossilized bones of extinct humans have been used by paleoanthropologists to explore human origins. These bones told the story of how the earliest humans—bipedal apes, actually—first emerged in Africa some 6 to 7 million years ago. Starting about 2 million years ago, the bones reveal that as humans became anatomically and behaviorally more modern, they swept out of Africa in waves into Asia, Europe, and finally into the New World. Even as paleoanthropologists continued to make important discoveries—Mary Leakey’s Nutcracker Man in 1959, Don Johanson’s Lucy in 1974, and most recently Martin Pickford’s Millennium Man, to name just a few—experts in genetics were looking at the human species from a very different angle. In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick first envisioned the double helix structure of DNA, the basic building block of all life. In the 1970s it was shown that humans share 98.7 percent of their genes with the great apes—that in fact genetically we are more closely related to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are to gorillas. And most recently the entire human genome has been mapped—we now know where each of the genes are located on the DNA strands that make up our chromosomes. In Human Origins: What Bones and Genomes Tell Us about Ourselves, two of the world’s foremost scientists, geneticist Rob DeSalle and paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, show how research into the human genome confirms what fossil bones have told us about human origins. This unprecedented integration of the fossil and genomic records provides the most complete understanding possible of humanity’s place in nature, its emergence from the rest of the living world, and the evolutionary processes that have molded human populations to be what they are today. Human Origins serves as a companion volume to the American Museum of Natural History’s new permanent exhibit, as well as standing alone as an accessible overview of recent insights into what it means to be human.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 5 reviews)

Keep this one for your grandchildren too by William C. Foster

5 Stars
March 16, 2009
To their credit and our benefit, DeSalle and Tattersall deal directly with the significance of modern scientific genetic studies to contemporary religious doctrines such as those espoused by the Catholic church and intelligent design (ID) folk. Genetisists posit that life processes such as evolution are equal (the same) for all animals. No favorites here. Continuing, by nature evolutionary change is dependent on the mystery and spontaneous emergence of random mutations. ID and other religions imagine an intelligent, preordained, immutable (no mutations here) design or cosmic plan. A line in the sand cut clear and deep by the informed authors.

Who We Are and How We Got That Way by Ralph White (New England)

5 Stars
October 01, 2008
Paleoanthropology has always been multidisciplinary. The addition of the study of the human genome has simply added incrementally to the disciplines required to fully understand human origins. Genomics is a discipline which could easily have glazed the eyes of the entry level reader without contributing to the understanding of the already scientifically literate. What DeSalle and Tattersall do with Human Origins is to show how molecular systematics contributes to the established interpretation of the fossil record. They tee up the subject by reviewing the state of scientific knowledge in the fields of evolution, geology, stratigraphy, genetics, x-ray crystallography, cladograms... And if you need a remedial paragraph or two on what "science" is, or what a brain is, this is your book. Pay particular attention to the factors which alter genomes over time. Understand how "genetic drift" and "natural selection" do the hard work in changing allele frequencies. The authors' explanations are masterful, for instance equating drift to sampling error in statistics. Understanding these basics will make it easier to understand the how certain features of early hominid physiology resulted from drift or selection. And you have to love how the authors refer to some of the facile misunderstandings of evolution as little more than "just so" stories (though they omit an attribution to Rudyard Kipling for the analogy). Most distressing is the revelation that the human y chromosome has been shrinking at a steady rate, and will in a mere 125,000 years completely disappear, leaving women alone on earth, with terminal consequences for our species. You used to be able to demonstrate your competence in the field of paleoanthropology with an understanding of sagital crests, dental wear patterns, or by your interpretation of the Laetoli footprints. Now you need to demonstrate your understanding of how the dispersion of mitochondrial DNA haplogroups illuminates early human migration routes. Human Origins will bring you up that curve in short order. The compelling issue in paleoanthropology, the current hot topic, is how human cognitive capabilities suddenly sprang into being. Our anatomical features hadn't changed since our advent, some 200,000 years ago, yet beginning about 30,000 years ago we started expressing ourselves in a way that signified we finally got it. Certainly by 14,000 years ago this capability had become fully developed in Cro Magnon. Other writers have postulated something called a "neural event," meaning some alteration in how the brain functioned. DeSalle and Tattersall offer a more compelling interpretation, that language changed everything and made us what we are today. Language facilitated what the authors call "orders of intentionality," that is to say I know that you know what I know. Before language that was very difficult. Language enabled us to employ our brains for abstract, conceptual reasoning, utilizing for the first time our brain's full functionality, and the rest, as they say, is history. There is, however, a problem with this book, and it is not with the content, but with its production. Ian Tattersall's books brought many of us up the learning curve on fundamental paleoanthropology, and he is a wonderful guy in the flesh, but even his most devoted fan will be shocked at the number of distracting editorial flaws in this book, in both the text and the graphics. If it's not too late I recommend that the authors stop payment on the editor's check.

Human origins by Carl R. Hancock

5 Stars
June 14, 2008
Thought the book did an overall great job of human origins,genetics,and the fossil record was well rounded. Could be too technical for some people not too familiar with human evolution so I would recommend from Lucy to language by Donald Johnson as a good primer.

Disjointed by Andrew Kiluk (Morehead City, NC)

1 Stars
May 29, 2008
I have been waiting for this book to come out for over 18 months. I am a big Ian Tattersall fan and appreciate the way he has been able over the years to make the study of human evolution and fossil man accessible to the lay reader in such books as The Fossil Trail,The Monkey in the Mirror, and Becoming Human. Im my opinion these books give a much better view of the current state of paleoanthropology and are better written. I found numerous typos in the text as well as the illustrations which were poorly put together. The sections on genetics were basic and often redundant- Wade's Before the Dawn explains these areas much better. Other books on human origins which I would recommend instead include Jordan's Neanderthal, Gibbon's The First Human, and Johanson's From Lucy to Language

Tough to read. by Sandra T. Casey (Baton Rouge, LA USA)

2 Stars
May 04, 2008
I had just finished reading "The Real Eve," "The Seven Daughters of Eve," "The Journey of Man," and "Anglo-Saxons, Picts and Celts," and then tried to plunge into this one. May be a good book, but very hard to read as it is too scientific for me to enjoy easily. Sandra Casey

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