Human Paleontology

A story of defiance and determination by a controversial scientist, this is Lee Berger's own take on finding Homo naledi, an all-new species on the human family tree and one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century. In 2013, Lee Berger, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, heard of a cache of bones in a hard-to-reach underground cave in South Africa. He put out a call around the world for petite collaborators - men and women small and adventurous enough to be able to squeeze through eight-inch tunnels to reach a sunless cave forty feet underground. It worked.

Although we usually think of technology as something unique to modern times, our ancestors began to create the first technologies millions of years ago in the form of prehistoric tools and weapons. Over time, eight key technologies gradually freed us from the limitations of our animal origins.

The ice held a secret for ten thousand years. Now, it’s awake. When a high-altitude corporate retreat at an isolated Rocky Mountain lodge is severed from the outside world by a catastrophic whiteout storm, the survivors think their biggest threat is the plummeting temperature. They are wrong. Deep in the abandoned underground research tunnels beneath the ski station, something ancient and hungry has been thawed from the permafrost. It is not a myth. It is Arctodus simus—the giant short-faced bear, an apex predator standing twelve feet tall and built for relentless slaughter. As the ...

Science Concepts Explained for Non-Scientists: Clear Guides to How the World Works Paleontology Explained for Non-Scientists: How Fossils, Deep Time, and Ancient Life Reveal Earth’s Past is a clear, engaging guide to one of the most fascinating sciences, written specifically for readers with no technical background. This book explains how scientists use fossils, rocks, and geological evidence to reconstruct Earth’s deep history and uncover the story of life across billions of years. Rather than focusing on jargon or exhaustive species lists, it emphasizes big ideas, core concepts, and ...

USA TODAY BESTSELLER 2024 ITW Thriller Award Winner Esquire “Best Horror Books of 2023” Pick A haunted paleontologist returns to the museum where his sister was abducted years earlier and is faced with a terrifying and murderous spirit in this chilling novel. Curator of paleontology Dr...

The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being "animal" and started being "human". In The Accidental Species, Henry Gee, longtime paleontology editor at Nature, takes aim at this misleading notion.

Africa has long been considered the cradle of life - where life and humans evolved - but somewhere west of Munich, Germany, paleoclimatologist and paleontologist Madelaine Böhme and her team make a discovery that is beyond anything they ever imagined: the 12-million-year-old bones of an ancient ape - Danuvius guggenmos - which makes headlines around the world and defies prevailing theories of human history and where human life began.

In Born in Africa, Martin Meredith follows the trail of discoveries about human origins made by scientists over the last hundred years, recounting their intense rivalry, personal feuds, and fierce controversies, as well as their feats of skill and endurance. The results have been momentous. Scientists have identified more than 20 species of extinct humans. They have firmly established Africa as the birthplace not only of humankind but also of modern humans.

Ethiopia is a mixed environment for exploration... and survival. It has had its grand moments, tied in with Jewish history, temples, world wide travel and such. But there are far too many pockets where none of that reached and had not for centuries. Verona Romero is an established archaeologist with a second doctorate in anthropology and Ethiopia calls to her to prove her worth beyond the constant search for treasure. No, the promise, this time, was fame, finding the very beginning of humanity on the dark continent, following in the footsteps of giants like world-renowned ...

As soon as man discovered writing, he began engaging in historiography (historical writing and philosophy), but paleoanthropology only really began in the late 1800s. As archaeologists began finding bones in European caves of a human race that was very different than any race in the modern world, the study of paleoanthropology was born. The race of those early humans who were found in the European caves were later termed Neanderthals, and for quite some time, they were believed to have been the race from which many modern humans were directly descended.

Approximately 200,000 years ago, as modern humans began to radiate out from their evolutionary birthplace in Africa, Neanderthals were already thriving in Europe - descendants of a much earlier migration of the African genus Homo. But when modern humans eventually made their way to Europe 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals suddenly vanished.

This dynamic chronicle of the race to find the "missing links" between humans and apes transports readers into the highly competitive world of fossil hunting and into the lives of the ambitious scientists intent on pinpointing the dawn of humankind. The quest to find where and when the earliest human ancestors first appeared is one of the most exciting and challenging of all scientific pursuits.

In his new book The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, human paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall argues that a long tradition of "human exceptionalism" in paleoanthropology has distorted the picture of human evolution. Drawing partly on his own career - from young scientist in awe of his elders to crotchety elder statesman - Tattersall offers an idiosyncratic look at the competitive world of paleoanthropology.

Ian Tattersall, a highly esteemed figure in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and paleontology, leads a fascinating tour of the history of life and the evolution of human beings. Starting at the very beginning, Tattersall examines patterns of change in the biosphere over time, and the correlations of biological events with physical changes in the Earth's environment.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Elephant's on Acid comes a collection of the wackiest theories from science and history. What if we’re living inside a black hole? What if we’ve already found extraterrestrial life? What if the dinosaurs died in a nuclear war? What if Jesus Christ...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Human Planet, A Pelican Book, by Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, read by Roy McMillan. Meteorites, methane, mega-volcanoes and now human beings; the old forces of nature that transformed Earth many millions of years ago are joined by another: us...

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Elephant's on Acid comes a collection of the wackiest theories from science and history. What if we’re living inside a black hole? What if we’ve already found extraterrestrial life? What if the dinosaurs died in a nuclear war? What if Jesus Christ...