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Ancestors: In Search of Human Origins
With revolutionary scientific theories, dramatic photographs, and his own exciting discoveries, world-famous paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson supports controversial hypotheses that challenge our most fundamental theories of human ancestry:
Our earliest ancestors left the trees to walk on two legs at least four million years ago as part of a unique sexual strategy. Our first large-brained ancestors survived as scavengers, competing with lions and hyenas for food, rather thatn being the noble hunters of popular imagination. Neandertals are a specialized, extinct side branch of the human family tree and were never part of our own species. Modern humans first evolved in Africa and later migrated around the world.
Our earliest ancestors left the trees to walk on two legs at least four million years ago as part of a unique sexual strategy. Our first large-brained ancestors survived as scavengers, competing with lions and hyenas for food, rather thatn being the noble hunters of popular imagination. Neandertals are a specialized, extinct side branch of the human family tree and were never part of our own species. Modern humans first evolved in Africa and later migrated around the world.
339 pages, Hardcover
Published February 8, 1994
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96 people want to read
About the author
Donald C. Johanson
13 books61 followersDonald Carl Johanson is an American paleoanthropologist. He is known for discovering the fossil of a female hominin australopithecine known as "Lucy" in the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 21, 2009
I must admit, I thought this book was going to be a "skimmer." You know the type--look at the pictures, read the captions, bold print, and you'll get the gist of it. But for some reason I was hooked from the get-go, from the introduction on. Why? I have no idea. Who ever even heard of a paleoanthropologist?
The key to this book's appeal is its readability. It is written in layman's terms, so it's understandable even to non-paleoanthropologists (I love that word). They also make it interesting by turning it into a detective story, and by giving us a hint of the controversy swirling around in intellectual circles over these issues:
Humans are ... a highly self-conscious, introspective species... We want to understand our beginnings, how we came to be who and what we are. To this end, paleoanthropologists and archeologists are prehistory detectives piecing together a complicated puzzle. The story of our past is loaded with clues, some already found and many yet to be discovered. We have archeological sites where past events must be painstakingly reconstructed from scraps of evidence. We have an array of increasingly sophisticated analytical techniques at our disposal, although first and foremost, we depend on our own powers of deduction and analysis.
The book starts out with the brave exploits of the two authors (the third is a ghostly presence in the narrative) in Africa, including the finding of "Lucy" the almost complete skeleton of a female Australopithecus afarensis 3.2 million years old. This was one thing in the book I remember hearing about. But they don't just pat themselves on the back for the whole book, they also delve into the accomplishments of others in the field, and provide a mini-history of paleoanthropology over the last 150 years. Each chapter covers a different hominid, different bones, dust and tools, and different expert commentary. There are great colour photos and black and white illustrations, but they are of bones, dust, and tools and the people who found them.
As I said earlier, I especially loved the war of words between the experts and their conflicting opinions. I never realized that PhD's could say such snotty things about each other. Much of the controversy revolves around the authors' main theories: that our ancestors began to walk on two legs as part of a unique sexual strategy, that they were scavengers for scraps off old carcasses and not noble hunters as everyone had said before, that Neandertals are an extinct side branch of the human family tree and not part of our own species, and that humans evolved in Africa and then spread throughout the world. Let the experts return to their corners and come out fighting. The book is a companion volume to a Nova television series but it is a hell of a lot of fun on its own.
The key to this book's appeal is its readability. It is written in layman's terms, so it's understandable even to non-paleoanthropologists (I love that word). They also make it interesting by turning it into a detective story, and by giving us a hint of the controversy swirling around in intellectual circles over these issues:
Humans are ... a highly self-conscious, introspective species... We want to understand our beginnings, how we came to be who and what we are. To this end, paleoanthropologists and archeologists are prehistory detectives piecing together a complicated puzzle. The story of our past is loaded with clues, some already found and many yet to be discovered. We have archeological sites where past events must be painstakingly reconstructed from scraps of evidence. We have an array of increasingly sophisticated analytical techniques at our disposal, although first and foremost, we depend on our own powers of deduction and analysis.
The book starts out with the brave exploits of the two authors (the third is a ghostly presence in the narrative) in Africa, including the finding of "Lucy" the almost complete skeleton of a female Australopithecus afarensis 3.2 million years old. This was one thing in the book I remember hearing about. But they don't just pat themselves on the back for the whole book, they also delve into the accomplishments of others in the field, and provide a mini-history of paleoanthropology over the last 150 years. Each chapter covers a different hominid, different bones, dust and tools, and different expert commentary. There are great colour photos and black and white illustrations, but they are of bones, dust, and tools and the people who found them.
As I said earlier, I especially loved the war of words between the experts and their conflicting opinions. I never realized that PhD's could say such snotty things about each other. Much of the controversy revolves around the authors' main theories: that our ancestors began to walk on two legs as part of a unique sexual strategy, that they were scavengers for scraps off old carcasses and not noble hunters as everyone had said before, that Neandertals are an extinct side branch of the human family tree and not part of our own species, and that humans evolved in Africa and then spread throughout the world. Let the experts return to their corners and come out fighting. The book is a companion volume to a Nova television series but it is a hell of a lot of fun on its own.
April 29, 2018
This book is the companion volume to a Nova series that must have ran a decade or two ago that I didn't watch and am unlikely to watch. Nonetheless, despite my well-known views on the evolutionary perspective that this book has [1], I found much about this book to appreciate. In particular, I found this book to be a triumph of human imagination. In spite of his evident desire to do otherwise, the author manages to make a far better case for design than for evolution, not least because this book features so much speculation from small amounts of highly ambiguous evidence in the ground. Even when someone is trying to deny that they are a created being, their own innate creativity gives the lie to their claims that the world developed without purpose and planning and creativity, not least because the more the evidence is thin, the more there is evidence of continual creating of massive (and fallacious) theories about human prehistory from the tiniest scraps of bones and material culture that can be found throughout the world. One does not know whether to pity the authors or to celebrate their unintentional imitatio dei.
This book of about 300 pages or so is divided into eight chapters. The first chapters inserts the author(s) into the story by looking at the return to Hadar after a period of considerable political unrest in Ethiopia. After this the author start going through a list of species that they think of as being in the larger human family one by one. There is Australopithecus afarensis, the species of "Lucy," which is posited to be the ape that stood up on its hind legs. After this there is a discussion of Homo habilis and the debate over whether this species was a mighty hunter or a wily scavenger. A slight detour to discuss the nutcracker "people" of Australopithecus robustus shows a dead end that ought to warn people who are too inclined to find a narrow niche and are not adaptable enough in the face of changing conditions. After this the author looks at Homo erectus and the development of big brains. A discussion of "archaic" Homo sapiens includes an explicit search for Eden either out of Africa or via a multiregional hypothesis. The last two chapters then conclude with a look at Homo neanderthalensis and the engima it presents as well as a brief look at the human revolution with "modern" Homo sapiens.
Reading a book like this for its factual value is nearly useless. Aside from the fact that the ratio of interpretation to fact is immense when so few fossils are found and when human imagination is so fecund (the second factor being more decisive here), hardly a year goes by when someone does not try to earn their reputation as a paleontologist by either finding some kind of bones or artifacts that disrupt the theory de jour or that inflict a serious reinterpretation of the evidence that exists. The author himself does a fair amount of attempting to debunk certain theories, unaware of course that his own theories are likely to be debunked and that the whole edifice of his field is based on some pretty shaky empirical grounds where more charity and less ferocity would be better for everyone involved. This is a good book if you like to read imaginative myths of human prehistory. If you expect to find factuality here, you are barking up the wrong tree, because this book is likely to be several rounds obsolete by the time anyone gets around to reading it now.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
This book of about 300 pages or so is divided into eight chapters. The first chapters inserts the author(s) into the story by looking at the return to Hadar after a period of considerable political unrest in Ethiopia. After this the author start going through a list of species that they think of as being in the larger human family one by one. There is Australopithecus afarensis, the species of "Lucy," which is posited to be the ape that stood up on its hind legs. After this there is a discussion of Homo habilis and the debate over whether this species was a mighty hunter or a wily scavenger. A slight detour to discuss the nutcracker "people" of Australopithecus robustus shows a dead end that ought to warn people who are too inclined to find a narrow niche and are not adaptable enough in the face of changing conditions. After this the author looks at Homo erectus and the development of big brains. A discussion of "archaic" Homo sapiens includes an explicit search for Eden either out of Africa or via a multiregional hypothesis. The last two chapters then conclude with a look at Homo neanderthalensis and the engima it presents as well as a brief look at the human revolution with "modern" Homo sapiens.
Reading a book like this for its factual value is nearly useless. Aside from the fact that the ratio of interpretation to fact is immense when so few fossils are found and when human imagination is so fecund (the second factor being more decisive here), hardly a year goes by when someone does not try to earn their reputation as a paleontologist by either finding some kind of bones or artifacts that disrupt the theory de jour or that inflict a serious reinterpretation of the evidence that exists. The author himself does a fair amount of attempting to debunk certain theories, unaware of course that his own theories are likely to be debunked and that the whole edifice of his field is based on some pretty shaky empirical grounds where more charity and less ferocity would be better for everyone involved. This is a good book if you like to read imaginative myths of human prehistory. If you expect to find factuality here, you are barking up the wrong tree, because this book is likely to be several rounds obsolete by the time anyone gets around to reading it now.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
December 15, 2018
Great Book. Learned Alot From It. ❄️
March 19, 2016
A fascinating, albeit outdated, account of the discovery of Australopithecus afarensis and other finds of anthropological significance. While much of the information has been revised and elaborated upon by modern scientific inquiry (e.g., the last chapter of the book struggles with whether or not Neanderthals were a separate species from us, whereas it now appears interbreeding did occur), that is part of the book's charm; those well-versed in modern paleoanthropology will appreciate having a glimpse into how the field was developing during the mid-90s. Most enjoyably, the book provides some narrative to Lucy's discovery, arguably being one of the most important findings of the 20th century.
January 23, 2016
Readability 6. Rating 6. Subtitled “In Search of Human Origins”. The Johanson’s, who found Lucy, survey the primary lineage of modern humans. More than that, they presented very cogently the range of historical misconceptions and the progression of human knowledge about our own origins, as well as the many debates that still rage today. As a part of this, the authors detail a number of the techniques used to better understand and hypothesize about what things were “really like”. Overall, I got a pretty coherent view of where we came from, and a new respect for the people who have spent their lives uncovering that view.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 21, 2018
Instead of fretting over employment and training issues, it must be nice to fret over whether Neanderthal men walked like us or had a different gait. This was the companion book to the Nova TV series on human origins. Best parts dealt with the Neanderthals, cave painting, and Australian aborigines.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews