Review by Booklist Review
The focus of this album is the hundreds of photographs of the small inventory of hominid fossils from which evolutionary history is inferred; yet Johanson's text, too, is impressive, packed with information sorted into 50 subspecialty summaries devoted, for example, to techniques of dating or to contentious interpretive arguments over dating the advent of "Eve," who made headlines in 1987 as a 200,000-year-old progenitor of all humans. Johanson (famed discoverer of the "Lucy" fossil) explains that genetic studies since the announcement have variously pushed back the date to one million years ago or replaced an individual Eve with a sizable originating population. After he has stated the principal issues being pursued in paleoanthropology, Johanson displays in sidebar style features about individual fossils: who found them, where, and how they fit into the evolutionary scheme. Short of visiting East Africa, where many of the fossils are housed, this is as close as most people can come to the actual evidence--virtue enough for the needs of most libraries. --Gilbert Taylor
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
No serious student of paleoanthropology can afford to miss this magnificent, encyclopedic survey of human origins. It combines a lucid, meticulous text by noted American paleontologist Johanson (well known for his discovery of Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old hominid skeleton from Ethiopia) and freelancer Edgar with more than 200 stunning color photographs of fossils, artifacts and prehistoric art by National Geographic chief staff photographer Brill. The book's first half succinctly yet comprehensively explores dozens of issues and controversies, among them our genetic similarity to our closest living relatives, African apes; what early humans looked like; Homo's probable beginnings in Africa and migrations therefrom; and the latest evidence regarding hominid lifestyles, diet, shelter, art, burial practices. The second half contains arguably the fullest systematic survey to date for the nonspecialist of fossil hominids, ranging from the earliest such find, in 1921, to the most recent specimens from Kenya and Ethiopia, unearthed in 1994-95 and dated to more than four million years. Johanson forcefully argues that race is a superficial cultural construct without any solid genetic basis, and he theorizes that language, a survival mechanism that evolved through natural selection, is intimately linked to our brain's evolution. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The man who discovered Lucy, our first bipedal ancestor, offers an illustrated overview of human evolution. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In one profusely illustrated volume, noted paleontologist Johanson (who discovered our earliest known ancestor, Lucy, as he recounted in his 1981 volume of that name) reviews all that is known about the origins and development of Homo sapiens. In numbered sections, he covers the fossil record, the evolution of the human body, and specifics on how paleontologists go about their work. Some thornier issues are also touched on, such as whether humans can really be divided into races and when language originated--a matter mostly of speculation, though Johanson cites some physical evidence indicating that Neanderthals may have been capable of speech. It is the photographs that promise to be the most exciting part of this book (though not seen in full color by Kirkus): stark, striking images of fossils, from skulls and jawbones to vertebrae and femurs and pelvic bones, from Australopithecus to Neanderthal to Homo sapiens dating back tens of thousand of years.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
