Humans Before Humanity

Humans Before Humanity PDF Author: Robert Andrew Foley
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631205289
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book recreates the lost world of the hominid species that lived and flourished for around one million years before, and in some cases after, the evolution of modern humans some 200,000 years ago.

Humans Before Humanity

Humans Before Humanity PDF Author: Robert Andrew Foley
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631205289
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book recreates the lost world of the hominid species that lived and flourished for around one million years before, and in some cases after, the evolution of modern humans some 200,000 years ago.

Humans Before Humanity

Humans Before Humanity PDF Author: Robert Foley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Human evolution
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description


Before Humanity

Before Humanity PDF Author: Stefan Herbrechter
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004502505
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
The current crisis in thinking the “human” raises questions not only about who or what may come after the human, but also about what happened before. What dark secrets lie in our ancestral past that may be stopping us from becoming human “otherwise”?

Before Atlantis

Before Atlantis PDF Author: Frank Joseph
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1591438268
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A comprehensive exploration of Earth’s ancient past, the evolution of humanity, the rise of civilization, and the effects of global catastrophes • Explores biological evidence for the aquatic ape theory and 20-million-year-old evidence of pre-human cultures from which we are not descended • Traces the genesis of modern human civilization to Indonesia and the Central Pacific 75,000 years ago after a near-extinction-level volcanic eruption • Examines the profound similarities of megaliths around the world, including Nabta Playa and Gobekli Tepe, to reveal the transoceanic civilization that built them all Exploring emerging and suppressed evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and biology, Frank Joseph challenges conventional theories of evolution, the age of humanity, the origins of civilization, and the purpose of megaliths around the world. He reveals 20-million-year-old quartzite tools discovered in the remains of extinct fauna in Argentina and other evidence of ancient pre-human cultures from which we are not descended. He traces the genesis of modern human civilization to Indonesia and the Central Pacific 75,000 years ago, launched by a catastrophic volcanic eruption that abruptly reduced humanity from two million to a few thousand individuals worldwide. Further investigating the evolutionary branches of humanity, he explores the mounting biological evidence supporting the aquatic ape theory--that our ancestors spent one or more evolutionary phases in water--and shows how these aquatic phases of humanity fall neatly into place within his revised timeline of ancient history. Examining the profound similarities of megaliths around the world, including Nabta Playa, Gobekli Tepe, Stonehenge, New Hampshire’s Mystery Hill, and the Japanese Oyu circles, the author explains how these precisely placed monuments of quartz were built specifically to produce altered states of consciousness, revealing the spiritual and technological sophistication of their Neolithic builders--a transoceanic civilization fractured by the cataclysmic effects of comets. Tying in his extensive research into Atlantis and Lemuria, Joseph provides a 20-million-year timeline of the rise and fall of ancient civilizations, both human and pre-human, the evolutionary stages of humanity, and the catastrophes and resulting climate changes that triggered them all--events that our relatively young civilization may soon experience.

Catching Fire

Catching Fire PDF Author: Richard Wrangham
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847652107
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In this stunningly original book, Richard Wrangham argues that it was cooking that caused the extraordinary transformation of our ancestors from apelike beings to Homo erectus. At the heart of Catching Fire lies an explosive new idea: the habit of eating cooked rather than raw food permitted the digestive tract to shrink and the human brain to grow, helped structure human society, and created the male-female division of labour. As our ancestors adapted to using fire, humans emerged as "the cooking apes". Covering everything from food-labelling and overweight pets to raw-food faddists, Catching Fire offers a startlingly original argument about how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. "This notion is surprising, fresh and, in the hands of Richard Wrangham, utterly persuasive ... Big, new ideas do not come along often in evolution these days, but this is one." -Matt Ridley, author of Genome

The Dawn of Human Culture

The Dawn of Human Culture PDF Author: Richard G. Klein
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 0470250712
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
A bold new theory on what sparked the "big bang" of human culture The abrupt emergence of human culture over a stunningly short period continues to be one of the great enigmas of human evolution. This compelling book introduces a bold new theory on this unsolved mystery. Author Richard Klein reexamines the archaeological evidence and brings in new discoveries in the study of the human brain. These studies detail the changes that enabled humans to think and behave in far more sophisticated ways than before, resulting in the incredibly rapid evolution of new skills. Richard Klein has been described as "the premier anthropologist in the country today" by Evolutionary Anthropology. Here, he and coauthor Blake Edgar shed new light on the full story of a truly fascinating period of evolution. Richard G. Klein, PhD (Palo Alto, CA), is a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. He is the author of the definitive academic book on the subject of the origins of human culture, The Human Career. Blake Edgar (San Francisco, CA) is the coauthor of the very successful From Lucy to Language, with Dr. Donald Johanson. He has written extensively for Discover, GEO, and numerous other magazines.

The Dawn of Everything

The Dawn of Everything PDF Author: David Graeber
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721106
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations

Narratives of Human Evolution

Narratives of Human Evolution PDF Author: Misia Landau
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300054316
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Aims to uncover a hidden level of agreement among theories of human evolution. Analyzing classic texts on evolution by Darwin and Keith as well as relatively recent accounts by Dart, Robinson and Tobias, the book reveals that they have a common narrative form based on the universal hero tale.

Almost Human

Almost Human PDF Author: Lee Berger
Publisher: Disney Electronic Content
ISBN: 1426218125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This first-person narrative about an archaeological discovery is rewriting the story of human evolution. A story of defiance and determination by a controversial scientist, this is Lee Berger's own take on finding Homo naledi, an all-new species on the human family tree and one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century. In 2013, Berger, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, caught wind of a cache of bones in a hard-to-reach underground cave in South Africa. He put out a call around the world for petite collaborators—men and women small and adventurous enough to be able to squeeze through 8-inch tunnels to reach a sunless cave 40 feet underground. With this team of "underground astronauts," Berger made the discovery of a lifetime: hundreds of prehistoric bones, including entire skeletons of at least 15 individuals, all perhaps two million years old. Their features combined those of known prehominids like Lucy, the famousAustralopithecus, with those more human than anything ever before seen in prehistoric remains. Berger's team had discovered an all new species, and they called it Homo naledi. The cave quickly proved to be the richest prehominid site ever discovered, full of implications that shake the very foundation of how we define what makes us human. Did this species come before, during, or after the emergence of Homo sapiens on our evolutionary tree? How did the cave come to contain nothing but the remains of these individuals? Did they bury their dead? If so, they must have had a level of self-knowledge, including an awareness of death. And yet those are the very characteristics used to define what makes us human. Did an equally advanced species inhabit Earth with us, or before us? Berger does not hesitate to address all these questions. Berger is a charming and controversial figure, and some colleagues question his interpretation of this and other finds. But in these pages, this charismatic and visionary paleontologist counters their arguments and tells his personal story: a rich and readable narrative about science, exploration, and what it means to be human.

Deep History

Deep History PDF Author: Andrew Shryock
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520270282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This breakthrough book brings science into history to offer a dazzling new vision of humanity across time. Team-written by leading experts in a variety of fields, it maps events, cultures, and eras across millions of years to present a new scale for understanding the human body, energy and ecosystems, language, food, kinship, migration, and more.