What do you think?
Rate this book
Paleontology: A Brief History of Life
"Endlessly absorbing and informative. It would be hard to imagine a better introduction to this most important and fascinating field.”—Bill Bryson, author of A Short History of Nearly Everything A Brief History of Life is the fifth title published in the Templeton Science and Religion Series, in which scientists from a wide range of fields distill their experience and knowledge into brief tours of their respective specialties. In this volume, Ian Tattersall, a highly esteemed figure in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and paleontology, leads a fascinating tour of the history of life and the evolution of human beings. Starting at the very beginning, Tattersall examines patterns of change in the biosphere over time, and the correlations of biological events with physical changes in the Earth’s environment. He introduces the complex of evolutionary processes, situates human beings in the luxuriant diversity of Life (demonstrating that however remarkable we may legitimately find ourselves to be, we are the product of the same basic forces and processes that have driven the evolutionary histories of all other creatures), and he places the origin of our extraordinary spiritual sensibilities in the context of the exaptational and emergent acquisition of symbolic cognition and thought. Concise and yet comprehensive, historically penetrating and yet up-to-date, responsibly factual and yet engaging, Paleontology serves as the perfect entrée to science's greatest story.
232 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2010
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 19, 2014
Paleontology A Brief History of Life by Ian Tattersall
It is difficult for human beings to grasp the very long time scales and complicated processes that are responsible for the evolution of life on Earth. “Paleontology,” by Ian Tattersall, is intended to be a brief introduction, something like a field guide, or a tourist manual to the history of life. It succeeds as a lucid summary by an expert.
This book was written under a confining agenda, since it was commissioned by the Templeton Science and Religion Series. It fits within a framework of “short and compelling books that are concise and convenient…for a general audience with interests in the sciences or humanities…”
The good news is that this book fulfills its agenda, and can be counted on by the general reader for its brevity and authority. The bad news is that Ian Tattersall has written much better books, and that much better books already exist to help the general reader to understand the history of life. This book is too rushed and compressed to be truly evocative of the wonder of its subject matter.
This book begins with the origin of planet Earth and it ends with the cognitive revolution of the human brain. It covers about four billion years in two hundred pages. Examples of its fine passages include this one: “ Sit back and watch the passing parade of animal life changing before your eyes as the epochs unroll.”
An example of its frantic, over-stuffed prose would be: “Taeniodonts, tillodonts, pantodonts, and the archaic ungulate genera all virtually disappeared.” Thus we are too quickly swept along through epochs and eras, animals, bone structures, fish, frogs and people.
“Paleontology” is at its best when Tattersall is discussing human evolution, on which he is a world-class expert. For example, he evokes and compresses the phenomenon of hominid evolution into the dominance of vision over smell, improved manipulative capacities in the hand, enlargement of the higher centers of the brain, and complex social relations. However, this book is only a pale copy of Tattersall’s book, “Masters of the Planet.” To hold in the mind’s eye in wonder the sweep of evolutionary changes in animal forms that carry us from a naked Earth to human civilization, I personally would prefer books such as, DK’s “Prehistoric Life,” (a book predominantly of pictures), or the classic with Stephen Jay Gould as general editor, “The Book of Life.”
While “Paleontology” has excellence, its agenda of compression reduces the wonder of life to a foreshortened history analogous to those brief texts that list all the kings who ruled but give you little feeling for the story lived by all the citizens.
Reviewed by Paul R. Fleischman author of "Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant"
It is difficult for human beings to grasp the very long time scales and complicated processes that are responsible for the evolution of life on Earth. “Paleontology,” by Ian Tattersall, is intended to be a brief introduction, something like a field guide, or a tourist manual to the history of life. It succeeds as a lucid summary by an expert.
This book was written under a confining agenda, since it was commissioned by the Templeton Science and Religion Series. It fits within a framework of “short and compelling books that are concise and convenient…for a general audience with interests in the sciences or humanities…”
The good news is that this book fulfills its agenda, and can be counted on by the general reader for its brevity and authority. The bad news is that Ian Tattersall has written much better books, and that much better books already exist to help the general reader to understand the history of life. This book is too rushed and compressed to be truly evocative of the wonder of its subject matter.
This book begins with the origin of planet Earth and it ends with the cognitive revolution of the human brain. It covers about four billion years in two hundred pages. Examples of its fine passages include this one: “ Sit back and watch the passing parade of animal life changing before your eyes as the epochs unroll.”
An example of its frantic, over-stuffed prose would be: “Taeniodonts, tillodonts, pantodonts, and the archaic ungulate genera all virtually disappeared.” Thus we are too quickly swept along through epochs and eras, animals, bone structures, fish, frogs and people.
“Paleontology” is at its best when Tattersall is discussing human evolution, on which he is a world-class expert. For example, he evokes and compresses the phenomenon of hominid evolution into the dominance of vision over smell, improved manipulative capacities in the hand, enlargement of the higher centers of the brain, and complex social relations. However, this book is only a pale copy of Tattersall’s book, “Masters of the Planet.” To hold in the mind’s eye in wonder the sweep of evolutionary changes in animal forms that carry us from a naked Earth to human civilization, I personally would prefer books such as, DK’s “Prehistoric Life,” (a book predominantly of pictures), or the classic with Stephen Jay Gould as general editor, “The Book of Life.”
While “Paleontology” has excellence, its agenda of compression reduces the wonder of life to a foreshortened history analogous to those brief texts that list all the kings who ruled but give you little feeling for the story lived by all the citizens.
Reviewed by Paul R. Fleischman author of "Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant"
October 27, 2021
It's a short, agile guide to, well, paleontology; it's engaging, well-researched and up-to-date. Unfortunately I was let down by some factors, one at least independent of the book itself, namely the Audible reader, who put too little time between the chapters and the internal divisions (thus blurring the boundaries of the different sections) as well as very little heart in the reading: when someone reads "The Paleozoic, Age of the Ancient Life", you can't read it as a string of words, you must realize that "Age of the Ancient Life" is a translation / paraphrase of the title (he also stumbles on the few Latin expressions and for someone who know Latin that does feel grating...) The other things, however, have to do with the text itself: for once, after the Paleozoic there's barely any mention of non-vertebrate life, not only bacteria and invertebrates, but also plants, and I did want something on the plants! The other thing is that effectively the whole second part is a story of human evolution: very interesting, but the title should then have been "A brief history of animal life and of humankind".
June 5, 2022
Great summary of the findings of paleontology presented conservatively with care not to assume too much from the evidence. I found it as an recommended alternative to Sapiens without added fictional details. I think it delivers on this promise.
Personally, it was a little difficult for me to not be overwhelmed by the amount of species distinctions and references to anatomical jargon and living animals because of me not being native in English and the book not relying on more illustrations for comparisons.
The only major disappointment was at the very end, when the author comprehensibly claims that to be human is to be spiritual—which is defensible—and then claims that religion is compatible with science and a very fine thing to pursue. I think that was sticking like a sore thumb in the book.
Personally, it was a little difficult for me to not be overwhelmed by the amount of species distinctions and references to anatomical jargon and living animals because of me not being native in English and the book not relying on more illustrations for comparisons.
The only major disappointment was at the very end, when the author comprehensibly claims that to be human is to be spiritual—which is defensible—and then claims that religion is compatible with science and a very fine thing to pursue. I think that was sticking like a sore thumb in the book.
July 15, 2014
Since I've been reading a fair amount lately on climate science, I came to feel that I needed to get a foundation in two related fields--geology and paleontology--in order to understand Earth's history better. I did a quick search online to find a recent and well-reviewed primer on paleontology and Ian Tattersall's Paleontology: A Brief History of Life is what I found.
I could have done much worse. Tattersall does an excellent job surveying the history of Earth's life from its mysterious and murky beginnings up to the entrance of Homo sapiens, and he does so in a clear and engaging fashion. One of the main impressions one gets when reading a survey of life over the course of hundreds of millions of years is the relentless progression of evolution. For example, I was stunned to learn that the lungs with which I breathe have evolved over eons from the swim bladders of the early fish that swam in the primeval oceans. Simple but startling facts like that can put your existence in an entirely new light, and I'll be reflecting on that particular fact for a long time to come.
In the latter half of the book, Tattersall concentrates on the development of two chordates--whales and man--and takes the reader into their evolution in some detail. Regarding whales, I was stunned to learn the advances paleontologists have made in recent decades. We now know that the early ancestors of whales were wolf-like mammals, with rather flattish heads, that splashed in the water catching fish.
Over the course of millions of years, that wolf-like mammal slowly became more and more alligator-like in form, eventually becoming totally dedicated to an aquatic existence. Incredibly, paleontologists have traced, through the fossil record, the slow migration of the early mammal's nostrils back over the head to the location of the modern-day whale's signature blowhole. It is an astounding story of evolution so remarkable that if the book contained nothing else, I would have considered the time I'd invested in reading it well worth it.
The evolution of man is every bit as fascinating, but here the wonder lies not in migrating nostrils or disappearing limbs but in the development of that which makes our species unlike any other: our cognition. What emerges from Tattersall's survey of our development is a sense of wonder at the intellectual explosion that has occurred so recently in our development.
One can get some idea of the development of the human brain by observing the stone tools he began to fashion as his brain, and evidently his reasoning powers, began to enlarge beyond the organ of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors. The earliest stone tools, which consisted of fractured pieces of rock that yielded sharp edges for cutting, are known to paleontologists as Mode 1. Mode 2 tools represented a significant step forward and required the ability to both plan and conceptualize; they are tools that contained not just a sharp edge, but that were designed to have a particular shape.
Somehow, the ancestors of modern man had moved from simply fracturing rocks to actually designing tools.
While it may not seem revolutionary at first, consider that Mode 2 tools required the toolmaker to have a conceptualization of the tool he wanted in his imagination and had to be able to find a stone that contained the requisite properties that would permit the desired tool to be fashioned from it. Understood in this way, you can begin to see why paleontologists ascribe such significance to the development of Mode 2 tools.
How long did it take man's ancestors to advance from Mode 1 tools to Mode 2? Mode 1 tools first appeared approximately 1.9 million years ago with the rise of Homo ergaster. The first Mode 2 tools begin to appear approximately half a million years later, but did not immediately supplant the Mode 1 tools. Both modes coexisted for nearly a million years until the Mode 2 tools pushed their primitive counterparts off the stage.
Such slow development of rudimentary technology may strike us as bizarre--but in fact it is entirely in keeping with the pace of the vast majority of evolutionary change. What is odd, to the point of being either miraculous or freakish, is the fantastic pace of technological progress of Homo sapiens in the past 10,000 years. In the stretch of time that is, geologically and paleontologically speaking, the blink of an eye, our species has experienced what can only be considered an abrupt cognitive explosion of titanic proportions.
It is such insights that make paleontology a fascinating study, and I'm grateful to Ian Tattersall for providing this excellent introduction to the subject.
I could have done much worse. Tattersall does an excellent job surveying the history of Earth's life from its mysterious and murky beginnings up to the entrance of Homo sapiens, and he does so in a clear and engaging fashion. One of the main impressions one gets when reading a survey of life over the course of hundreds of millions of years is the relentless progression of evolution. For example, I was stunned to learn that the lungs with which I breathe have evolved over eons from the swim bladders of the early fish that swam in the primeval oceans. Simple but startling facts like that can put your existence in an entirely new light, and I'll be reflecting on that particular fact for a long time to come.
In the latter half of the book, Tattersall concentrates on the development of two chordates--whales and man--and takes the reader into their evolution in some detail. Regarding whales, I was stunned to learn the advances paleontologists have made in recent decades. We now know that the early ancestors of whales were wolf-like mammals, with rather flattish heads, that splashed in the water catching fish.
Over the course of millions of years, that wolf-like mammal slowly became more and more alligator-like in form, eventually becoming totally dedicated to an aquatic existence. Incredibly, paleontologists have traced, through the fossil record, the slow migration of the early mammal's nostrils back over the head to the location of the modern-day whale's signature blowhole. It is an astounding story of evolution so remarkable that if the book contained nothing else, I would have considered the time I'd invested in reading it well worth it.
The evolution of man is every bit as fascinating, but here the wonder lies not in migrating nostrils or disappearing limbs but in the development of that which makes our species unlike any other: our cognition. What emerges from Tattersall's survey of our development is a sense of wonder at the intellectual explosion that has occurred so recently in our development.
One can get some idea of the development of the human brain by observing the stone tools he began to fashion as his brain, and evidently his reasoning powers, began to enlarge beyond the organ of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors. The earliest stone tools, which consisted of fractured pieces of rock that yielded sharp edges for cutting, are known to paleontologists as Mode 1. Mode 2 tools represented a significant step forward and required the ability to both plan and conceptualize; they are tools that contained not just a sharp edge, but that were designed to have a particular shape.
Somehow, the ancestors of modern man had moved from simply fracturing rocks to actually designing tools.
While it may not seem revolutionary at first, consider that Mode 2 tools required the toolmaker to have a conceptualization of the tool he wanted in his imagination and had to be able to find a stone that contained the requisite properties that would permit the desired tool to be fashioned from it. Understood in this way, you can begin to see why paleontologists ascribe such significance to the development of Mode 2 tools.
How long did it take man's ancestors to advance from Mode 1 tools to Mode 2? Mode 1 tools first appeared approximately 1.9 million years ago with the rise of Homo ergaster. The first Mode 2 tools begin to appear approximately half a million years later, but did not immediately supplant the Mode 1 tools. Both modes coexisted for nearly a million years until the Mode 2 tools pushed their primitive counterparts off the stage.
Such slow development of rudimentary technology may strike us as bizarre--but in fact it is entirely in keeping with the pace of the vast majority of evolutionary change. What is odd, to the point of being either miraculous or freakish, is the fantastic pace of technological progress of Homo sapiens in the past 10,000 years. In the stretch of time that is, geologically and paleontologically speaking, the blink of an eye, our species has experienced what can only be considered an abrupt cognitive explosion of titanic proportions.
It is such insights that make paleontology a fascinating study, and I'm grateful to Ian Tattersall for providing this excellent introduction to the subject.
April 28, 2019
I listened to this as an audiobook, though goodreads says such an edition doesn't exist. I actually liked this book a great deal. I'm pretty certain it is an introductory textbook, which means it uses the field's terminology, and doesn't fell obligated to stick to crowd pleasing topics. I like this very much, and may even give it a second listen.
The amazon review mentioned some connection with the Templeton foundation, which finances authors willing to say something nice about religion, but the mention seems almost perfunctory and comes at the very end of the book.
The amazon review mentioned some connection with the Templeton foundation, which finances authors willing to say something nice about religion, but the mention seems almost perfunctory and comes at the very end of the book.
December 15, 2014
A nice introduction to paleontology and the evolution of life on Earth. However, the ending is too much accommodating to religion and the Templeton organization, in my opinion. Not surprising considering that the Templeton organization financed and published the book.
March 18, 2015
Reading this book in a single sitting is like going to a natural history museum and reading every single plaque. It's pretty awesome, and by the end you have a legitimate sense of awe. I just wish there had been more illustrations to complement the visual descriptions.
July 22, 2014
I tried so many times to pick this book back up, but it was just so information dense that I couldn't focus.
Read
November 15, 2015How do I read a book
June 18, 2024
Interesting inferences and the reasons behind them about several species and how they lived.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews