Review by Choice Review
This is a difficult book to review because the author does not seem to have a clear idea of his audience. Paleobiology is the attempt to reconstruct the lifeways and adaptations of extinct organisms, with less emphasis on their evolutionary interrelationships. Obviously, the reconstruction of how past forms of humans lived would be of great interest to a variety of readers, from undergraduates to researchers to the general public. But Eckhardt (Pennsylvania State Univ.) seems to mix those levels so that his book is less useful than desired. In general, the level is upper-division undergraduate or beginning graduate student, but there are attempts to raise the level to speak to the author's colleagues, while other sections appear to aim at a wider readership. The topics range from fossils to modern human adaptations to genetics, and although integrating these somewhat diverse viewpoints is a useful goal, the author does not fully attain it. Recommended instead for laypersons: Ian Tattersall's books on human evolution, e.g., The Fossil Trail (CH, Nov'95); The Last Neanderthal (1995); or even Extinct Humans (written with Jeffrey H. Schwartz, CH, Nov'00) or Donald C. Johanson and Blake Edgar's From Lucy to Language (1996); and as a text, R. Klein's The Human Career (2nd ed., 1999; 1st ed., CH, May'90). E. Delson CUNY Herbert H. Lehman College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
