How far back can you trace your family tree? Most people cannot go
beyond their great-great-grandparents. The oldest written records
recount only our most recent past. The farther back in time we go,
the fewer the surviving traces. How can we know about the lives of
our ancestors who lived 30,000 - or 300,000 - or 3 million years
ago? In The Extraordinary Story of Human Origins, Piero and Alberto
Angela address the many difficulties and challenges in assembling a
truly complete picture of human evolution. In tracing our origins,
different "documents" and "evidence" must be used: rock sediments,
footprints, and fossils that were petrified in the folds of the
earth over the course of millennia but have become the object of
scientific study only in recent decades. To piece together the
intriguing puzzle of human origins it is necessary to study all
clues that are made available by multidisciplinary research,
including paleontology, bio-chemistry, geology, genetics, physics,
and climatology. Like so many Sherlock Holmeses, researchers seek
all possible clues and analyze them meticulously in hopes of being
able to reconstruct the past. Just as a cigarette butt, a hair, or
a button may provide the key to identifying the "culprit" in a
detective story, so can the layer of a fossil, the way a rock has
been chipped, or the detail of a joint offer important information
on the life, appearance, and behavior of our ancestors. These
pieces are few and fragmentary, ranging from the footprints left in
volcanic ash 3.7 million years ago by hominids who walked exactly
as we do, to a "Y" pattern on molars and mitochondrial DNA. But
they all provide information on the diet, diseases, hunting
techniques, and art of Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo
erectus, the Neanderthal, and the first Homo sapiens sapiens.
Written in an accessible but authoritative style, this study
includes many lively reconstructions of the everyday life of our
earliest ancestors based on the most reliable data. The
Extraordinary Story of Human Origins makes available to a wide
audience a unique look inside the exciting world of research into
the study of the beginnings of human life on earth.
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