[asa] Review: The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors

This is an excellent review of a well-written book on a subject of
critical significance for the ASA.
Jack Haas

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/54054;jsessionid=aaadvqJWCGk75L
/
The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors/. Ann
Gibbons. xxvi + 306 pp. Doubleday, 2006. $26.

Ever since a 1924 revelation first pointed to Africa as the cradle of
humankind, a slow but steady stream of fossil discoveries has brought a
general view of human evolution into focus. The pace has accelerated in
the past 15 years, rapidly yielding an intriguing yet bewildering array
of fossils of early ancestors of Homo sapiens. These new finds push
back the base of our unique line, and that of our not-so-distant
cousins, to possibly 6 or more million years ago. This time period is
tantalizingly close to what most genetic models predict for the
divergence of lineages that ultimately evolved into humans and
chimpanzees. Finding a representative of the species that took the
first step-on two legs-toward becoming human is indeed one of the
key pursuits of paleoanthropology...more

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Received on Sat Oct 14 13:07:27 2006