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Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

A behind-the-scenes account of the discovery of the oldest skeleton of a human ancestor, named "Ardi" — a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution.

In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White — "the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology" — uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia's Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than "Lucy," then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution — how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today's chimpanzee — and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy.

Fossil Men is the first full-length exploration of Ardi, the fossil men who found her, and her impact on what we know about the origins of the human species. It is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body. Kermit Pattison brings into focus a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including one of the world's greatest fossil hunters, Tim White — an exacting and unforgiving fossil hunter whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant who sometimes didn't bother going home at night to devote more hours to science; Owen Lovejoy, a onetime creationist-turned-paleoanthropologist; Berhane Asfaw, who survived imprisonment and torture to become Ethiopia's most senior paleoanthropologist and who fought for African scientists to gain equal footing in the study of human origins; and the Leakeys, for decades the most famous family in paloanthropology.

An intriguing tale of scientific discovery, obsession and rivalry that moves from the sun-baked desert of Africa and a nation caught in a brutal civil war, to modern high-tech labs and academic lecture halls, Fossil Men is popular science at its best, and a must read for fans of Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 544
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 978-0-06-241028-3
  • EAN
  • 9780062410283
  • Genres
  • science, history, anthropology, biology, audiobook, africa, historical, adult
  • Release date
  • 2020