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Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind
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Description

"A rip-roaring tale, Fossil Men is one of those rare books that can be a prism through which to view the world, exposing the fabric of the Earth and illuminating the Tree of Life." —New York Times bestselling author Peter Nichols

A behind-the-scenes account of the shocking discovery of the skeleton of "Ardi," a human ancestor far older than Lucy - a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution.

In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White—"the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology"—uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia's Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than "Lucy," then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution—how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today's chimpanzee—and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy.

Fossil Men is the first full-length exploration of Ardi, the fossil men who found her, and her impact on what we know about the origins of the human species. It is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body. Kermit Pattison brings into focus a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including one of the world's greatest fossil hunters, Tim White—an exacting and unforgiving fossil hunter whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant who sometimes didn't bother going home at night to devote more hours to science; Owen Lovejoy, a onetime creationist-turned-paleoanthropologist; Berhane Asfaw, who survived imprisonment and torture to become Ethiopia's most senior paleoanthropologist and who fought for African scientists to gain equal footing in the study of human origins; and the Leakeys, for decades the most famous family in paleoanthropology.

An intriguing tale of scientific discovery, obsession and rivalry that moves from the sun-baked desert of Africa and a nation caught in a brutal civil war, to modern high-tech labs and academic lecture halls, Fossil Men is popular science at its best, and a must read for fans of Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

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Format:
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen
Edition:
Unabridged
Street Date:
11/10/2020
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780062660039
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APA Citation (style guide)

Kermit Pattison. (2020). Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind. Unabridged HarperAudio.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Kermit Pattison. 2020. Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind. HarperAudio.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Kermit Pattison, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind. HarperAudio, 2020.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Kermit Pattison. Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind. Unabridged HarperAudio, 2020.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
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Date Updated:
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Fossil Men
fullDescription

"A rip-roaring tale, Fossil Men is one of those rare books that can be a prism through which to view the world, exposing the fabric of the Earth and illuminating the Tree of Life." —New York Times bestselling author Peter Nichols

A behind-the-scenes account of the shocking discovery of the skeleton of "Ardi," a human ancestor far older than Lucy - a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution.

In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White—"the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology"—uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia's Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than "Lucy," then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution—how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today's chimpanzee—and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy.

Fossil Men is the first full-length exploration of Ardi, the fossil men who found her, and her impact on what we know about the origins of the human species. It is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body. Kermit Pattison brings into focus a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including one of the world's greatest fossil hunters, Tim White—an exacting and unforgiving fossil hunter whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant who sometimes didn't bother going home at night to devote more hours to science; Owen Lovejoy, a onetime creationist-turned-paleoanthropologist; Berhane Asfaw, who survived imprisonment and torture to become Ethiopia's most senior paleoanthropologist and who fought for African scientists to gain equal footing in the study of human origins; and the Leakeys, for decades the most famous family in paleoanthropology.

An intriguing tale of scientific discovery, obsession and rivalry that moves from the sun-baked desert of Africa and a nation caught in a brutal civil war, to modern high-tech labs and academic lecture halls, Fossil Men is popular science at its best, and a must read for fans of Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        November 2, 2020
        In this lively debut, journalist Pattison digs into the story of Ardi, a 4.4-million-year-old hominid skeleton with profound evolutionary ramifications. At the heart of this tale is Tim White, a Berkeley professor with a “monastic devotion to fossils,” who led the team that discovered Ardi in Ethiopia’s Middle Awash region in 1994 and spent 15 years studying the remains. Pattison describes the digs that unearthed Ardi, an ancestor of modern homo sapiens more than a million years older than the more famous Lucy, and captures White and company’s grueling expeditions to Ethiopia, where they had to navigate political tensions to retrieve the fossils and, after nine years, take them abroad for study. Pattison ably combines the adventure yarn with scientific minutiae, tracking the team’s findings, which ultimately refuted the theory that modern apes are close relics of a common human ancestor. Pattison doesn’t neglect the academic backlash against this challenge to conventional wisdom (one professor called them “so far wrong as to be laughable”) and makes vivid characters of the Ardi team. Though Pattison goes deep on the science, the abundance of detail gets to be a bit much. Nevertheless, those interested in human origins should check out this vivid and thorough study. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        September 1, 2020

        In this debut, journalist Pattison follows the story of abrasive and methodical scientist Tim White's frequent conflict and occasional collaborations with other paleoanthropolologists as his team search out early hominid fossils in Africa. They discover Ardipithecus ramidus, or Ardi, further upstream in the same Ethiopian valley as the Lucy fossil, but 1.2 million years older, and seek clues to understand where she fits into human ancestry. Besides this central scientific adventure, Pattison, who spent time in the field with White's team, explores other issues as well: How much training and authority is given to researchers from the countries where our ancient roots reside? How should we esteem the fieldwork to uncover and document the fossils vs. the theoretical and computer-aided approaches used to interpret them? And what duty do paleontologists have to the scientific community to share their finds and when? Additionally, there are the scientific debates on the relationships between the extant modern ape species (humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas) and when and where their lineages diverged; genetic analyses seem to tell one story that must be brought in line with the physical evidence. VERDICT Compelling science centered on a polarizing personality, this is perfect for National Geographic readers who want to dig deep into the human evolutionary tree.--Wade Lee-Smith, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

        Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        Starred review from September 15, 2020
        An entertaining update on a process as "red in tooth and claw" as nature itself. Perhaps once a decade, a journalist recounts the history and latest findings in human evolution, a subject of apparently endless appeal--Martin Meredith's Born in Africa (2011) remains a page-turner. Pattison caught the bug in 2012 and devoted seven years to gathering material. The result is a satisfying education on the status of the human family tree over the past 5 million years, and the author provides detailed explanations of how anthropologists tease information from bones, teeth, and local geology. It's a journalistic maxim that readers prefer personalities to events, and Pattison describes plenty of ambitious, media-savvy researchers whose often bitter hostility has stalled progress but makes for lively reading. He passes quickly over the father of African anthropology, the colorful Louis Leakey, spends more time on his wife and family and their pioneering findings, and gives a major role to Donald Johanson, whose 1974 discovery of a partial skeleton of "Lucy," a small, primitive human ancestor, and the resulting bestselling books made him a familiar name. Mostly Pattison focuses on anatomist Owen Lovejoy and anthropologist Tim White, whose energy, work ethic, and opinions made him a lightning rod for controversy even before his team's 1994 finding of "Ardi," a skeleton older than Lucy whose age approaches the era when hominids and chimpanzees diverged from their presumed common ancestor. Colleagues fumed for 15 years as his team studied the bones, and the resulting massive 2009 report aggravated matters. The anthropological community learned that "they were looking up the wrong tree for human origins, and that their quest to link early humanity to modern apes was nullified by Ardi because the last common ancestor looked like no modern species." Pattison delivers a gripping and reasonably balanced account of the predictably hostile reception, and this remains a controversial interpretation, although it has made some converts. Big personalities, simmering turmoil, and fascinating popular science.

        COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        October 1, 2020
        For a long time, Lucy, a hominid skeleton found in 1974 in the Afar region of Ethiopia, was the oldest human ancestor ever discovered. Then, in 1994, a team of paleontologists working in roughly the same area uncovered a skeleton of a hominin that predates Lucy by a million years (give or take). She was given the designation Ardipithecus ramidus, but she's more commonly known as Ardi; and, although she is not a direct ancestor of humans (she's a new genus, a hitherto-unknown hybrid of arboreal ape and terrestrial biped ), she's opened new windows into the history of human evolution. This is the story of her discovery. Like Matiland and Johanson and Edey's Lucy, it's an exciting book, full of colorful personalities, momentous discoveries, and new ideas that challenge us to reconsider everything we believed about the evolution of humankind. Although the author doesn't shy away from technical terminology, the book isn't written for experts in the field; it's for the lay reader with a healthy interest in the subject. Lucy became a best-seller, and Fossil Men may well follow in its footsteps.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

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"A rip-roaring tale, Fossil Men is one of those rare books that can be a prism through which to view the world, exposing the fabric of the Earth and illuminating the Tree of Life." —New York Times bestselling author Peter Nichols

A behind-the-scenes account of the shocking discovery of the skeleton of "Ardi," a human ancestor far older than Lucy - a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution.

In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White—"the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology"—uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia's Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than "Lucy," then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution—how we...

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