From the emergence of the first hominids more than four million years ago to the evolution of modern humans, Walking with Cavemen takes us on a fascinating discovery of our primitive origins and behavior. Far more than just another examination of the fossil evidence, the significance of each hominid's characteristics is translated for the reader into a fascinating conjecture of how they mated, brought up their young, survived attack, and met the other challenges that affected them.
| |||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
"What is it that makes us human?" asks Lynch, head of the BBC Science Unit. Published to correspond with a Discovery Channel series of the same name, Lynch's coffee-table exploration of the origins of man runs through the record of the species, exploring how our ancestors mated, ate and defended themselves. Full-page educational spreads explain "What a tooth can tell" and "The birth of bigger brains." Chapters are divided chronologically, beginning 3.5 million years ago, with "First Steps," and travel in time, through "A Hominid Explosion," "Missing Link" and "Extinction." Present-tense writing puts a reader in the grassy plains with these creatures, hunting with them and experiencing humiliation with them: "The young male and his friend know they have made fools of themselves and, as they extract themselves from the mud and dust and slope back towards the group, the old female gesticulates, and barks strange nasal sounds at them." A mixture of imagined anecdote and explanation brings these ancestors to life, as do lifelike Land of the Lost-looking re-creations of each being in the difficult stages of human development. The voyage here is constantly guided ("To find out, we need to leave afarensis and travel further back in time: another four million years"), to the point where the handholding becomes obtrusive. But the main attraction here is the pictures: stills from the series that use Planet of the Apes-style make-up to bring prehistory to life, along with stock-seeming geological and savanna shots. It's all familiar, but competently executed.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Accompanying a major four-part BBC1 series, this is the follow-up to the hugely successful Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Beasts.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An essential addition to the series,
This review is from: Walking With Cavemen (Hardcover)
Like the first two publications in the series, "Walking with Dinosaurs" and "Walking with Prehistoric Beasts," "Walking with Cavemen" follows the same format and is packed with full color photographs, but focuses exclusively on the evolution of humans. It describes the lives, trials, and even thought processes of the main "characters" in the story of mankind's development, including, but not limited to, Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, and modern Homo sapiens.Unlike its predecessors, which feature a combination of computer-generated images and photographs, "Cavemen" uses no artificially produced images (except for some of the prehistoric animals), relying solely on actual photographs of live human models/actors with elaborate costumes and make-up artistry. The advantage is that this results in more realistic pictures because they are not doctored up, unlike those featured in "Dinosaurs" and "Beasts," some of which (though not all) appeared somewhat fake, because they were. The downside, however, is that this resulted in a huge disparity between the appearances of the australopithecines of "Cavemen" and their computer-generated counterparts of "Beasts." It also, unfortunately, resulted in pictures which, though quite realistic, are disappointingly inaccurate. Not conforming to the text's descriptions of our ancestors who were long armed and short legged or with no chin, the pictures reveal Neanderthals with chins as prominent as ours and australopithecines with our body proportions. Nevertheless, "Walking with Cavemen" is superb. The text, though inevitably speculative in places, is highly informative, enlightening, and thought-provoking, and the pictures go a long way toward giving us an idea of what it would actually be like to come face to face with our apelike ancestors. It is an excellent companion to the "Walking with Cavemen" video and a must for fans of "Walking with Dinosaurs" and "Walking with Prehistoric Beasts" as well as anyone with an interest in human evolution.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good companion book...,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Walking With Cavemen (Hardcover)
Walking With Cavemen is a great companion book to the TV series, even with a foreword by Nigel Marven who starred in the BBC version but was never in any of the versions I saw. The book follows the series, with inserts of information about the fossils, stone tools and archaeologists that allow us to know what we know.
But you have to remember that the series, and therefore the book, are mostly scenarios. Speculative reconstructions used to test our ideas and theories can sometimes seem outdated. And many are. But even if they prove to be wrong at least they tell us what early hominids did NOT do. How do we know some lived in family groups? Well, if somebody broke a leg and lived long enough to heal they were most likely taken care of. But how do we know they developed whites in their eyes? Did they use stone tools to hunt or just process dead bodies they found? When was fire truly discovered and controlled? We don't know or can only guess at some of it. But that is what makes such books and TV series so much fun.
5.0 out of 5 stars
An essential rediscovery of our evolutionary prehistoric past in cavemen,
By Peppercorn (sydney australia) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Walking With Cavemen (Hardcover)
Popular and ultimately continuing with the relese, of walking with the dinosaurs comes another series called walking with cavemen that,is to do with how our hominid family gradually and slowly evolved through means of adapation to climate within the area which became, for all primate species an epic saga for superemcy of survival that's existed within a branch that's stemmed out into a essential family tree of our prehistoric past of gaining a better idea on how we once were as species of hominid primates.Excellent book! five stars from me!
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
