Customer Reviews

The Human Odyssey: Four Million Years of Human Evolution

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Ian Tattersall does a marvelous job of setting forth four million years of human evolution. He covers the disagreements among paleontologists and their colleagues, offers up competing theories and, on the whole, does a wonderful job of explaining what we think we know about human evolution.

While not overly complex, the book does require fairly intense reading. The illustrations are extremely well selected and presented. I highly recommend this for anyone with an interest in exploring human evolution.

Jerry

Since Tattersall starts his book with the formation of the first living cells, the book actually encompasses 4 billion years of evolution. Nonetheless, this is a nice entry level book for a high school student interested in learning about the basics of paleontology and paleoanthropology. The chapters are short and crisp. The illustrations are well thought out and appropriate. Tattersall also nicely ties the book into the goings on at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, a great place to see some of the exhibits about which he writes. Some of Tattersall's information is stale because advances in paleoanthroplogy are happening so quickly.
There is one rather bizarre comment in the foreword by Donald Johanson. He writes, "Like no other species that has ever lived, we control the life of all living things -- including ourselves...Extinction is forever. We must not let it happen." This is surprising coming from such an educated man. Every good student of evolution knows that every species, including Homo sapiens, is destined for extinction. To suggest that Homo sapiens can exert some control over this process is egotistical nonsense.

Remember seeing all those pictures of various "hominids" lined up according to the supposed progression from apes to humans? According to Henry Gee's 2001 book, In Search of Deep Time, such scenarios are works of complete and utter narrative FICTION, unsupported by any credible understanding of the fossil record. According to Gee, all of the "hominid" fossils that have any bearing on human "evolution" can be stored in one small box. This is all of the evidence we have of human "evolution"--one small little box of fossils supposedly representing a time period of multiple millions of years. And we have more more and better fossils for "hominids" than for any other class of species, according to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution.

Evolution was, is, and always will be, nothing more than atheistic superstition.