This book explores important chapters of past and recent African history from a multidisciplinary perspective. It covers an extensive time range from the evolution of early humans to the complex cultural and genetic diversity of modern-day populations in Africa. Through a comprehensive list of chapters, the book focuses on different time-periods, geographic regions and cultural and biological aspects of human diversity across the continent. Each chapter summarises current knowledge with perspectives from a varied set of international researchers from diverse areas of expertise. The book provides a valuable resource for scholars interested in evolutionary history and human diversity in Africa. Contributors are Shaun Aron, Ananyo Choudhury, Bernard Clist, Cesar Fortes-Lima, Rosa Fregel, Jackson S. Kimambo, Faye Lander , Marlize Lombard, Fidelis T. Masao, Ezekia Mtetwa, Gilbert Pwiti, Michele Ramsay, Thembi Russell, Carina Schlebusch, Dhriti Sengupta, Plan Shenjere-Nyabezi, Mario Vicente.

Carbon (C), Nitrogen (N) and Phosphorus (P) are three of the most important elements used to build living beings, and their uptake from the environment is consequently essential for all organisms. Photosynthesis is the process in which plants absorb atmospheric C as they grow and convert it to biomass. However, plants acquire N and P only when these are available in the soil solution, which makes these elements the most limiting nutrients in plant growth and productivity in most ecosystems. When plant residues and roots decompose, the C, N and P they contain is transformed primarily into soil organic matter (SOM) or C and N can release to the atmosphere. Recent interest on the global C, N and P cycles has focused attention on the different proportion of terrestrial C, N and P stored in different ecosystem pools. Cuatro Cienegas represents an exceptional place, since the plants are not the base of the food web, they are the microbial community, that recycle the elements essential for life. In this book we describe how this is an analog of early Earth.

Since their discovery in 1869, the dictyostelids have attracted the attention of scientists in a wide variety of fields. This interest has stemmed from their peculiar lifestyle and developmental properties, which were shaped by the evolutionary forces that generated multicellularity during eukaryotic evolution. More recently, the dictyostelids have gained attention due to the striking similarities found at the genomic, cellular and biochemical levels with human cells, which has propelled the species Dictyostelium discoideum to become a model system for biology and medicine in many laboratories. This book covers the latest advances in our knowledge of these extraordinary organisms with topics spanning from their evolutionary history, ecology and diversity to the recent discoveries regarding their cellular and molecular biology.

'Steve Brusatte, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, brings mammals out from the shadow of their more showy predecessors in a beautifully written book that . . . makes the case for them as creatures who are just as engaging as dinosaurs.' - The Sunday Times, 'Best Books For Summer' 'In this terrific new book, Steve Brusatte . . . brings well-known extinct species, the sabre-toothed tigers and the woolly mammoths, thrillingly back to life' - The Times The passing of the age of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to become ascendant. But mammals have a much deeper history. They - or, more precisely, we - originated around the same time as the dinosaurs, over 200 million years ago; mammal roots lie even further back, some 325 million years. Over these immense stretches of geological time, mammals developed their trademark features: hair, keen senses of smell and hearing, big brains and sharp intelligence, fast growth and warm-blooded metabolism, a distinctive line-up of teeth (canines, incisors, premolars, molars), mammary glands that mothers use to nourish their babies with milk, qualities that have underlain their success story. Out of this long and rich evolutionary history came the mammals of today, including our own species and our closest cousins. But today's 6,000 mammal species - the egg-laying monotremes including the platypus, marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas that raise their tiny babies in pouches, and placentals like us, who give birth to well-developed young - are simply the few survivors of a once verdant family tree, which has been pruned both by time and mass extinctions. In The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, palaeontologist Steve Brusatte weaves together the history and evolution of our mammal forebears with stories of the scientists whose fieldwork and discoveries underlie our knowledge, both of iconic mammals like the mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers of which we have all heard, and of fascinating species that few of us are aware of. For what we see today is but a very limited range of the mammals that have existed; in this fascinating and ground-breaking book, Steve Brusatte tells their - and our - story.

This timely encyclopedia presents an arsenal of evidence for evolution that goes beyond the typical textbook examples. Arguing for Evolution: An Encyclopedia for Understanding Science provides readers with a single source for the scientific evidence supporting evolution. The book shows how scientists have tested the predictions of evolutionary theory and created an unshakeable foundation of evidence supporting its truth. As such, it demonstrates how evolution serves as a case study for understanding the scientific method and presents a logical model for scientific inquiry. The evidence for evolution is presented historically and topically in an accessible, example-rich, and logical format, using an arsenal of examples that goes beyond the typical textbook matter. The chapters are structured around a series of hypotheses that the authors put to the test, amassing evidence on fossils, comparative anatomy, molecules, and evolutionary biology in order to conclude that evolution is scientific fact. Learning about this fascinating field is enhanced through "see for yourself" examples that include original data and figures from key historical and contemporary papers in evolutionary biology. More than 100 historical and contemporary examples of the evidence for evolution Images of places, people, and artifacts that have been important in the effort to understand life's origins

In this latest edition of the Long Term Ecological Research Network series, John Hobbie and George Kling synthesize the findings from the NSF-funded Arctic LTER project based in Toolik Lake, Alaska, a site that has been active since the mid 1970's. The book presents research concerning the core issues of climate-change science, and addresses the treeless regions of arctic Alaska, as well as the adjoining boreal forests. As a whole, the book examines both terrestrial and freshwater-aquatic ecosystems, and their three typical habitats: tundra, streams and lakes. The book provides a history of the Toolik Lake LTER site, and discusses its present condition and future outlook. It features contributions from top ecologists, biologists, and environmental scientists, creating a multidisciplinary survey of the Alaskan arctic ecosystem. Chapter topics include glacial history, climatology, land-water interactions, mercury found in the Alaskan arctic, and the response of lakes to environmental change. The final chapter brings together these findings in order to make predictions regarding the consequences that arctic Alaska faces due to global warming and climate change, and discusses the future of the LTER site in the region. Alaska's Changing Arctic is the definitive scientific survey of the past, present, and future of the ecology of the Alaskan arctic, and the comprehensive source for the findings from the LTER site in the region.

This book encapsulates over three decades of the author's work on comparative functional respiratory morphology. It provides insights into the mechanism(s) by which respiratory means and processes originated and advanced to their modern states. Pertinent cross-disciplinary details and facts have been integrated and reexamined in order to arrive at more robust answers to questions regarding the basis of the functional designs of gas exchangers. The utilization of oxygen for energy production is an ancient process, the development and progression of which were underpinned by dynamic events in the biological, physical, and chemical worlds. Many books that have broached the subject of comparative functional respiratory biology have only described the form and function of the end-product, ' the gas exchanger; they have scarcely delved into the factors and the conditions that motivated and steered the development from primeval to modern respiratory means and processes. This book addresses and answers broad questions concerning the critical synthesis of multidisciplinary data, and clarifies previously cryptic aspects of comparative respiratory biology.

This is a compelling exploration of how our understanding of evolution is key to the future of our planet. When Charles Darwin started writing his work On "Origin of Species", he could hardly have envisioned how much we would discover about the origin of life over the next 150 years. Today's evidence points to an inescapable and simple conclusion - we evolved and we are still evolving. This persuasive and elegant book, argues that understanding evolution has never mattered more in human history. It explains in detail how health, food production, and human impact on the environment are dependent on our knowledge of evolution.

This volume contains a contemporary, integrated description of the processes of language. These range from fast scales (fractions of a second) to slow ones (over a million years). The contributors, all experts in their fields, address language in the brain, production of sentences and dialogues, language learning, transmission and evolutionary processes that happen over centuries or millenia, the relation between language and genes, the origins of language, self-organization, and language competition and death. The book as a whole will help to show how processes at different scales affect each other, thus presenting language as a dynamic, complex and profoundly human phenomenon.

Just how far did Charles Darwin's luck - both good and bad - affect his life and scientific discoveries? One might make a case for saying that Darwin's life was dogged by ill-luck (or perhaps ill-fortune is more appropriate). His mother died when he was seven; he was sent to a school at which he 'learnt little'; he left Edinburgh Medical School after two years, unqualified. He undertook a five-year voyage although he was prone to sea-sickness; his girlfriend (of whom there is evidence he was very fond) married someone else a few months into this voyage. He was affected by ill-health throughout much of his life. One of his children appears to have been mentally handicapped and this child, and also his beloved Annie, died in infancy. In addition to all this, his brother became addicted to drugs.On the other hand one could argue that he had a privileged and fortunate life - perhaps the more common view. At a number of key points in his life he made a choice, or others made a choice, or circumstances occurred, that profoundly influenced the path that he took. There is a school of thought, one that this book investigates, that although Darwin came to the right conclusions, he did not actually follow the right path in getting there. While his science was sometimes flawed, he had the distinct knack of good instinct. Whilst on his voyage to the Galapagos vital evidence that would have led to his theories becoming clearer quite literally slipped through his fingers - Galapagos turtles were caught, examined and their shells thrown overboard. Had he been more thorough, Darwin may have noticed that the clues to his theory of evolution were on these very shells.

Evolutionary theory addresses the phenomenon of the origin and diversity of plant and animal species that we observe. In recent times, however, it has become a predominant ideology which has gained currency far beyond its original confines. Attempts to understand the origin and historical development of human culture, civilization and language, of the powers of human cognition, and even the origin of the moral and ethical values guiding and constraining everyday life in human societies are now cast in an evolutionary context. In "Evolutionary Theory and the Creation Controversy" the author examines evolutionary theory from a historical perspective, explaining underlying metaphysical backgrounds and fundamental philosophical questions such as the paradoxical problem of change, existence and creation. He introduces the scientists involved, their research results and theories, and discusses the evolution of evolutionary theory against the background of Creationism and Intelligent Design.

This volume of Progress in Brain Research provides a synthetic source of information about state-of-the-art research that has important implications for the evolution of the brain and cognition in primates, including humans. This topic requires input from a variety of fields that are developing at an unprecedented pace: genetics, developmental neurobiology, comparative and functional neuroanatomy (at gross and microanatomical levels), quantitative neurobiology related to scaling factors that constrain brain organization and evolution, primate palaeontology (including paleoneurology), paleo-anthropology, comparative psychology, and behavioural evolutionary biology.

Written by internationally-renowned scientists, this timely volume will be of wide interest to students, scholars, science journalists, and a variety of experts who are interested in keeping track of the discoveries that are rapidly emerging about the evolution of the brain and cognition.

Written by internationally renowned scientists, this timely volume will be of wide interest to students, scholars, science journalists, and a variety of experts who are interested in keeping track of the discoveries that are rapidly emerging about the evolution of the brain and cognition.

As a species, we are currently experiencing dramatic shifts in our lifestyle, family structure, health, and global contact. Evolutionary Anthropology provides a powerful theoretical framework to study such changes, revealing how current environments and legacies of past selection shape human diversity. This book is the first major review of the emerging field of Applied Evolutionary Anthropology bringing together the work of an international group of evolutionary scientists, addressing many of the major public health and social issues of this century. Through a series of case studies that span both rural and urban situations in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, each chapter addresses topics such as natural resource management, health service delivery, population growth and the emergence of new family structures, dietary, and co-operative behaviours. The research presented identifies the great, largely untapped, potential that Applied Evolutionary Anthropology holds to guide the design, implementation and evaluation of effective social and public health policy. This book will be of interest to policy-makers and applied researchers, along with academics and students across the biological and social sciences.

"Absoliutno blagopoluchnoe ozero Baikal!" the Russian scientist looking out over the great lake says. "Lake Baikal is Perfect!" And humans can never harm it.
For a man cut loose from his life in the U.S., Lake Baikal-Siberia's sacred inland sea-becomes a place of pilgrimage, the focal point of a 25,000-mile journey by land and sea in search of connection, permanence, restoration and hope.
Following a difficult divorce, veteran environmental journalist Peter Thomson sets off from Boston with his younger brother for one of nature's most remarkable creations, in one of the farthest corners of the planet. Lake Baikal, a gargantuan crack in the Siberian plateau, is the world's largest body of fresh water, its deepest and oldest lake, and a cauldron of evolution, home to hundreds of unique creatures, including the world's only freshwater seal. It's also among the most pristine lakes on earth, with a mythical ability to protect itself from the growing human impact-a "perfect," self-cleansing ecosystem.
A trip halfway around the world by train, cargo ship and rubber raft brings the brothers to a place of sublime beauty, deep history and immense natural power. But at Baikal they also find ominous signs that this perfect piece of nature could yet succumb to the even more powerful forces of human hubris, carelessness and ignorance. They find that despite its isolation, Baikal is connected to everything else on Earth, and that it will need the love and devotion of people around the world to protect it.
On their trek to and from Siberia the author and his brother also encounter a stream of people who are also lonely, displaced and yearning for something beyond the limits of theirown lives, but many of whom are also big-hearted and deeply connected to their own communities and the world around them. What begins as a search for restoration in nature becomes as well a discovery of the restorative power of trust, faith and human connection.

This volume summarizes recent advances in our understanding of the mechanisms that produce successful symbiotic partnerships involving microorganisms. It begins with a basic introduction to the nature of and mechanistic benefits derived from symbiotic associations. Taking that background knowledge as the starting point, the next sections include chapters that examine representative examples of coevolutionary associations that have developed between species of microbes, as well as associations between microbes and plants. The authors conclude with a section covering a broad range of associations between microbes and invertebrate animals, in which they discuss the spectrum of hosts, with examples ranging from bryozoans and corals to nematodes, arthropods, and cephalopods. Join the authors on this journey of understanding!

In this deep examination of functional morphology, a renowned paleoanthropologist offers a new way to investigate human evolution through the fossil record. It is common for two functional anatomists to examine the exact same fossil material, yet argue over its evolutionary significance. How can this be? Traditionally, paleoanthropology has interpreted hominin fossil morphology by first considering the ecological challenges hominins faced, then drawing adaptive inferences based on the idea that skeletal morphology is largely a reflection of paleoecology. In Functional Inference in Paleoanthropology, innovative paleoanthropologist David J. Daegling suggests that researchers can resolve dichotomous interpretations of the fossil record by instead focusing on the biology and development of the bones themselves-such as measurable responses to deformations, stresses, and damage. Critically exploring how scientists probe and interpret fossil morphology for behavioral and adaptive inferences, Daegling makes the case that an intelligible science of functional morphology in the fossil record is impossible without the inclusion of this mechanobiological perspective. Drawing on historical examples from long-standing debates on the emergence of bipedality and the dietary shifts that facilitated the emergence of the hominin clade, Daegling traces the disjunctions between theoretical principles of comparative morphology and methodological practice in the paleontological context of human evolution. Sharing rich findings from recent decades of research in skeletal biomechanics, Functional Inference in Paleoanthropology examines how bone adapts over the lifespan, what environmental factors influence its quality, and how developmental constraints limit the skeleton's adaptive potential over evolutionary time.

Arguing that human evolution has come to a stand-still, this book sets out to explore the evolutionary steps that have defined life on this planet. It describes the stages from cosmic to chemical and biological evolution and to the development of civilization and culture. From this scientific approach, the author concludes that new rules of ethics are required in order to maintain and improve the civilization and culture of humanity. Matare argues for corrective genetic interference and explores the moral implications.

This volume integrates the latest findings on earliest life forms, identified and characterised in some of the oldest rocks on Earth. New material from prominent researchers in the field is presented and evaluated in the context of previous work. Emphasis is placed on the integration of analytical methods with observational techniques and experimental simulations. The opening section focuses on submarine hot springs that the majority of researchers postulates served as the cradle of life on Earth. In subsequent sections, evidence for life in strongly metamorphosed rocks such as those in Greenland is evaluated and early ecosystems identified in the well preserved Barberton and Pilbara successions in Southern Africa and Western Australia. The final section includes a number of contributions from authors with alternate perspectives on the evidence and record of early life on Earth. Audience This volume will be valuable to researchers and graduate students in biogeosciences, geochemistry, paleontology and geology interested in the origin of life on earth.

This rhetorical study of the various language strategies and competing worldviews involved in the 140-year argument between Biblical creationists and Darwinian evolutionists focuses on the 1860 Huxley/Wilberforce debate, the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and the 1981 Arkansas Creation-Science Trial. When Darwin published his Origins of Species in 1859, he initiated a debate about the origin of human life and the role of God in human affairs scarcely equalled in world history. Smout traces the response of Biblical creationists to Darwinian evolutionists. Looking carefully at the stories told and the tactics used by both sides, he analyzes all available accounts of the original debate culminating in the 1860 Huxley/Wilberforce debate, the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and the 1981 Arkansas Creation-Science Trial. Professor Smout argues that both sides in the controversy use various language strategies to persuade the culture as a whole to see the world that they see and to enact their position as public policy. As Smout illustrates, the problem is that both sides rely on an inadequate conception of language as a namer of timeless realities rather than as an instrument used by human communities to achieve their goals. He attempts to articulate a better view of language and to show how it might help solve intractable arguments such as this. He argues that we should see language as a tool that shapes what we see, and definitions of terms as political acts rather than statements of fact made by disciplinary experts. An important analysis for students and scholars in rhetoric, history, religion, and sociology.

Facsimile reprint of the 1909 Collier edition. Complete with illustrations and notes.

1. 1 Nautilus and Allonautilus: Two Decades of Progress W. Bruce Saunders Department of Geology Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr PA 19010 wsaunder@brynmawr. edu Neil H. Landman Division of Paleontology American Museum of Natural History New York, New York 10024 landman@amnh. org When Nautilus: Biology and Paleobiology of a Living Fossil was published in 1987, it marked a milestone in cross-disciplinary collaboration. More than half of the contributing authors (36/65) were paleontologists, many of whom were collaborating with neontological counterparts. Their interest in studying this reclusive, poorly known animal was being driven by a search for clues to the mode of life and natural history of the once dominant shelled cephalopods, through study of the sole surviving genus. At the same time, Nautilus offered an opportunity for neontologists to look at a fundamentally different, phylogenetically basal member of the extant Cephalopoda. It was a w- win situation, combining paleontological deep-time perspectives, old fashioned expeditionary zeal, traditional biological approaches and new techniques. The results were cross-fertilized investigations in such disparate fields as ecology, functional morphology, taphonomy, genetics, phylogeny, locomotive dynamics, etc. As one reviewer of the xxxvi Introduction xxxvii book noted, Nautilus had gone from being one of the least known to one of the best understood of living cephalopods.

Together with early theoretical work in population genetics, the debate on sources of genetic makeup initiated by proponents of the neutral theory made a solid contribution to the spectacular growth in statistical methodologies for molecular evolution. Evolutionary Genomics: Statistical and Computational Methods is intended to bring together the more recent developments in the statistical methodology and the challenges that followed as a result of rapidly improving sequencing technologies. Presented by top scientists from a variety of disciplines, the collection includes a wide spectrum of articles encompassing theoretical works and hands-on tutorials, as well as many reviews with key biological insight. Volume 2 begins with phylogenomics and continues with in-depth coverage of natural selection, recombination, and genomic innovation. The remaining chapters treat topics of more recent interest, including population genomics, -omics studies, and computational issues related to the handling of large-scale genomic data. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology (TM) series format, this work provides the kind of advice on methodology and implementation that is crucial for getting ahead in genomic data analyses. Comprehensive and cutting-edge, Evolutionary Genomics: Statistical and Computational Methods is a treasure chest of state-of the-art methods to study genomic and omics data, certain to inspire both young and experienced readers to join the interdisciplinary field of evolutionary genomics.

Michael P. Richards and Jean-Jacques Hublin The study of hominin diets, and especially how they have (primates, modern humans), (2) faunal and plant studies, (3) evolved throughout time, has long been a core research archaeology and paleoanthropology, and (4) isotopic studies. area in archaeology and paleoanthropology, but it is also This volume therefore presents research articles by most of becoming an important research area in other fields such as these participants that are mainly based on their presentations primatology, nutrition science, and evolutionary medicine. at the symposium. As can hopefully be seen in the volume, Although this is a fundamental research topic, much of the these papers provide important reviews of the current research research continues to be undertaken by specialists and there in these areas, as well as often present new research on dietary is, with some notable exceptions (e. g. , Stanford and Bunn, evolution. 2001; Ungar and Teaford, 2002; Ungar, 2007) relatively lit- In the section on modern studies Hohmann provides a tle interaction with other researchers in other fields. This is review of the diets of non-human primates, including an unfortunate, as recently it has appeared that different lines interesting discussion of the role of food-sharing amongst of evidence are causing similar conclusions about the major these primates. Snodgrass, Leonard, and Roberston provide issues of hominid dietary evolution (i. e.