Customer Reviews

The Origins of Man

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This amply illustrated book explains how humans came to be, using the latest fossil evidence to trace evolution from our nonhuman ancestors. There are plenty of disagreements over interpretation, such as the fossil of a "hobbit-like" person of Flores Island, Indonesia found in 2004. The author even-handedly covers both sides of the various controversies, giving his opinion of the reliability of the evidence. Artwork, tools, and possible migration patterns are also covered. Advances continue to be made in this field -- for instance, the discovery of more Flores fossils was announced two weeks before I wrote this review. The book was written in 2007 but is going to be out of date in a few years.

This book provides a beautifully rendered overview of the 7 million years since our last common ancestor with the apes. Combining maps, photos, drawings and text, it shows how much we've learned about ourselves -- and candidly shares the gaps still to be filled by future discoveries, which should inspire the next generation of paleontologists.

The one negative: The copy-editing of the text is astonishingly sloppy for a book of this quality. I'm not talking about simple typos or letter transpositions: Entire sentences are garbled as though the author left off in mid-revision and never came back... and the editor failed to notice. In other places, material appears to have been re-ordered without being re-read or revised so that, for example, a technical acronym is used in one paragraph and then defined (as if never used before) in the next. At times, you'll need to re-read an entire paragraph a couple of times to figure out what was intended! Two pages alone (186 & 187) contain more errata than you'd normally find in an entire book of this quality. I very much hope there will be a 2nd edition that fixes the textual problems, because this book deserves to be widely read.