Customer Reviews

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Cambridge Reference Book)

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Excellent work. In depth treatment of the subject yet accesible to everyone.It covers every imaginable aspect of human evolution by the men and woman that are at the frontiers of this science.

this book fully covers the subject and gives all the scientific details in depth and up to date. many contributors and many graphics. few personal biases, discussion in a scientific style where other books are narrative / prosaic.

Anyone who is interested in understanding human origins is likely to be attracted to this book. It actually consists of a very comprehensive collection of articles by specialists - specialists on everything from "The structure of DNA" to "Tribal peoples in the modern world." Hidden away among all this specialised knowledge are some interesting conclusions, but they take a lot of searching for. There is one on page 358 - a three-quarter page box headed "Throwing". Barbara Isaac suggests that our ancestors, lacking sharp canine teeth or claws, made up for it, once their hand were freed from walking duties, by becoming good at throwing stones. There is another exciting idea on page 88. In another three-quarter page box, M H Day suggests that bipedalism involved a smaller pelvic girdle, which made it more difficult to give birth to a big-brained baby.

There are some more exciting ideas, but the great bulk of the text, whilst good background material for the specialised anthropologist, doesn't tell us anything very interesting. Some of it is downright irrelevant, merely filling up space. Why did we need an article on the New World Monkeys? They are nothing to do with our ancestry. And why must the book start off by trotting out the old chestnut about life starting off 3000 million years ago as "short stretches of nucleic acid floating in a chemical sea". Those who still believe that, do so on faith alone - it's science fiction. The truth is that no one knows how life began, if indeed it ever did begin.

What the book lacks, above all, is an intelligent overview, someone who can draw the strands together and tell us what it all means - the kind of overview that is attempted on the site evolution-of-man.info. Perhaps we should not expect this kind of overview. Certainly we don't get it.