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Author: Paul Shepard
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 159726847X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
"When we grasp fully that the best expressions of our humanity were not invented by civilization but by cultures that preceded it, that the natural world is not only a set of constraints but of contexts within which we can more fully realize our dreams, we will be on the way to a long overdue reconciliation between opposites which are of our own making." --from Coming Home to the Pleistocene Paul Shepard was one of the most profound and original thinkers of our time. Seminal works like The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, Thinking Animals, and Nature and Madness introduced readers to new and provocative ideas about humanity and its relationship to the natural world. Throughout his long and distinguished career, Paul Shepard returned repeatedly to his guiding theme, the central tenet of his thought: that our essential human nature is a product of our genetic heritage, formed through thousands of years of evolution during the Pleistocene epoch, and that the current subversion of that Pleistocene heritage lies at the heart of today's ecological and social ills. Coming Home to the Pleistocene provides the fullest explanation of that theme. Completed just before his death in the summer of 1996, it represents the culmination of Paul Shepard's life work and constitutes the clearest, most accessible expression of his ideas. Coming Home to the Pleistocene pulls together the threads of his vision, considers new research and thinking that expands his own ideas, and integrates material within a new matrix of scientific thought that both enriches his original insights and allows them to be considered in a broader context of current intellectual controversies. In addition, the book explicitly addresses the fundamental question raised by Paul Shepard's work: What can we do to recreate a life more in tune with our genetic roots? In this book, Paul Shepard presents concrete suggestions for fostering the kinds of ecological settings and cultural practices that are optimal for human health and well-being. Coming Home to the Pleistocene is a valuable book for those familiar with the life and work of Paul Shepard, as well as for new readers seeking an accessible introduction to and overview of his thought.
Author: Paul Shepard
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 159726847X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Get Book Here
Book Description
"When we grasp fully that the best expressions of our humanity were not invented by civilization but by cultures that preceded it, that the natural world is not only a set of constraints but of contexts within which we can more fully realize our dreams, we will be on the way to a long overdue reconciliation between opposites which are of our own making." --from Coming Home to the Pleistocene Paul Shepard was one of the most profound and original thinkers of our time. Seminal works like The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, Thinking Animals, and Nature and Madness introduced readers to new and provocative ideas about humanity and its relationship to the natural world. Throughout his long and distinguished career, Paul Shepard returned repeatedly to his guiding theme, the central tenet of his thought: that our essential human nature is a product of our genetic heritage, formed through thousands of years of evolution during the Pleistocene epoch, and that the current subversion of that Pleistocene heritage lies at the heart of today's ecological and social ills. Coming Home to the Pleistocene provides the fullest explanation of that theme. Completed just before his death in the summer of 1996, it represents the culmination of Paul Shepard's life work and constitutes the clearest, most accessible expression of his ideas. Coming Home to the Pleistocene pulls together the threads of his vision, considers new research and thinking that expands his own ideas, and integrates material within a new matrix of scientific thought that both enriches his original insights and allows them to be considered in a broader context of current intellectual controversies. In addition, the book explicitly addresses the fundamental question raised by Paul Shepard's work: What can we do to recreate a life more in tune with our genetic roots? In this book, Paul Shepard presents concrete suggestions for fostering the kinds of ecological settings and cultural practices that are optimal for human health and well-being. Coming Home to the Pleistocene is a valuable book for those familiar with the life and work of Paul Shepard, as well as for new readers seeking an accessible introduction to and overview of his thought.
Author: Charles River
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 46
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Book Description
*Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading The Pleistocene spans a period from around 2.5 million years ago (mya) to just over 12,000 years ago, and it was an epoch of enormous change on Earth, mainly characterized by climate changes involving fluctuations between periods of extreme heat and long periods of glaciation. This period is commonly known as the Ice Age despite the fact there were actually a number of separate periods of cold. Along with the climate challenges, this was also the period that saw the development of modern humans. The origin of our ancient ancestors is still a matter of debate amongst paleontologists, and classification systems for early hominoids are constantly being updated as new discoveries are made. What is generally agreed upon is the species Homo sapiens belong to the order primates and the sub-order anthropoids. Within the anthropoids sub-order, humans belong to the family hominids, which also includes other animals such as the orangutan and the great apes. Drilling down even further, humans belong to a sub-group of hominids known as hominin. The sub-group hominin includes humans, as well as chimpanzees and gorillas. Discoveries have revealed more than twenty species of the genus Homo, all of which appeared during the Pleistocene Epoch, and all but Homo sapiens became extinct during the same period. The challenge is understanding which of these groups are predecessors to Homo sapiens and which are separate groups that died out leaving no current representation. Not knowing this information makes it difficult to determine neat classification and establish precisely when hominins separated from the rest of the non-hominin primates. It is generally accepted that hominoids and the first hominins evolved in what is now Africa. Somewhere around 7 mya, the common hominoid lineage split into two distinct evolutionary lines: the ancestors of modern chimpanzees and those of modern humans. Around 2.5 mya, a new genus of hominin appeared. Homo had larger brains than their predecessors as well as smaller jaws and teeth. The very first stone tools date to this period when there were a number of different hominin species. The very first true humans, Homo erectus, appeared around 2 mya. These new creatures could hardly have chosen a more difficult time to appear. In addition to facing the challenges of simply surviving in a generally hostile environment, the world was about to enter a period of convulsive climatic change. The new humans would face drought and extreme heat, as well as long periods of cooling where glaciers spread across the surface of the planet, but they survived, and by the time the Pleistocene Epoch ended around 12,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had become one of the most significant species on the planet. The Pleistocene Era: The History of the Ice Age and the Dawn of Modern Humans looks at the development of the era, what life on Earth was like, and the origins of archaic humans. Along with pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Pleistocene like never before.
Author: Lydia Pyne
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143123424
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
An enthralling scientific and cultural exploration of the Ice Age—from the author of How the Canyon Became Grand From a remarkable father-daughter team comes a dramatic synthesis of science and environmental history—an exploration of the geologic time scale and evolution twinned with the story of how, eventually, we have come to understand our own past. The Pleistocene is the epoch of geologic time closest to our own. The Last Lost World is an inquiry into the conditions that made it, the themes that define it, and the creature that emerged dominant from it. At the same time, it tells the story of how we came to discover and understand this crucial period in the Earth’s history and what meanings it has for today.
Author: Kim Sterelny
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197531385
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
"No human now gathers for himself or herself the essential resources for life: food, shelter, clothing, and the like. Humans are obligate co-operator, and this has been true for tens of thousands of years; probably much longer. In this regard, humans are very unusual. Cooperation outside the family is rare: though it can be very profitable, it is also very risky, as cooperation makes an agent vulnerable to incompetence and cheating. This book presents a new picture of the emergence of cooperation in our lineage, developing through four fairly distinct phases from a baseline that was probably fairly similar to living great apes, who cooperate, but in fairly minimal ways. As adults, they rarely depend on others when the outcome really matters. This book suggests that cooperation began to be more important for humans through an initial phase of cooperative foraging generating immediate returns from collective action in small mobile bands. This established in our lineage about 1.8 million years ago, perhaps earlier. Over the rest of the Pleistocene, cooperation became more extended in its social scale, with forms of cooperation between bands gradually establishing, and in spatial and temporal scale too, with various forms of reciprocation becoming important. The final phase was the emergence of cooperation in large scale, hierarchical societies in the Holocene, beginning about 12,000 years ago. This picture is nested in a reading of the archaeological and ethnographic record, and twinned to an account of the gradual elaboration of cultural learning in our lineage, making cooperation both more profitable and more stable"--
Author: John A. Van Couvering
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521341158
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
This book documents the agreed geological reference point for the Pleistocene boundary, and its worldwide correlation.
Author: Richard A. Fariña
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253007194
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458
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Book Description
“An enjoyable read that provides a substantial amount of detail on the biology, ecology, and distribution of these fantastic animals . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice More than 10,000 years ago spectacularly large mammals roamed the pampas and jungles of South America. This book tells the story of these great beasts during and just after the Pleistocene, the geological epoch marked by the great ice ages. Megafauna describes the history and way of life of these animals, their comings and goings, and what befell them at the beginning of the modern era and the arrival of humans. It places these giants within the context of the other mammals then alive, describing their paleobiology—how they walked; how much they weighed; their diets, behavior, biomechanics; and the interactions among them and with their environment. It also tells the stories of the scientists who contributed to our discovery and knowledge of these transcendent creatures and the environment they inhabited. The episode known as the Great American Biotic Interchange, perhaps the most important of all natural history “experiments,” is also an important theme of the book, tracing the biotic events of both North and South America that led to the fauna and the ecosystems discussed in this book. “Collectively, this book brings attention to the discovery and natural history of ancient beasts in South America while providing a broader temporal and geographic background that allows readers to understand their evolution and potential immigration to South America.” —Quarterly Review of Biology “An excellent volume . . . This book is likely to facilitate progress in the understanding of fossil mammals from the Americas.” —Priscum
Author: Barbara Welker
Publisher: Open SUNY Textbooks
ISBN: 9781942341413
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Where did we come from? What were our ancestors like? Why do we differ from other animals? How do scientists trace and construct our evolutionary history? The Evolution of Our Tribe: Hominini provides answers to these questions and more. The book explores the field of paleoanthropology past and present. Beginning over 65 million years ago, Welker traces the evolution of our species, the environments and selective forces that shaped our ancestors, their physical and cultural adaptations, and the people and places involved with their discovery and study. It is designed as a textbook for a course on Human Evolution but can also serve as an introductory text for relevant sections of courses in Biological or General Anthropology or general interest. It is both a comprehensive technical reference for relevant terms, theories, methods, and species and an overview of the people, places, and discoveries that have imbued paleoanthropology with such fascination, romance, and mystery.
Author: Richard Foster Flint
Publisher: Lodge Press
ISBN: 1443721735
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 626
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Book Description
This informative book takes a comprehensive look at the subject of glacial geology in the Pleistocene Epoch, and is highly recommended for inclusion on the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in the subject. Preface: 'The Pleistocene epoch occupies a peculiarly important place in the time scale of geology, for it embraces the events of the latest million or more years in the history of the Earth and is therefore so recent that it bridges the gap between the geologic changes now in progress and the more remote past. "When the work of the geologist is finished," wrote Gilbert, "and his final comprehensive report written, the longest and most important chapter will be upon the latest and shortest of the geologic periods. The chapter will be longest because the exceptional fullness of the record of the latest period will enable him to set forth most completely its complex history. The changes of each period - its erosion, its sedimentation, and its metamorphism - obliterate part of the records of its predecessor and of all earlier periods, so that the order of our knowledge must continue to be, as it now is, the inverse order of their antiquity." This fact in itself furnishes an adequate reason for making the principal facts of the Pleistocene epoch compactly available, not only to geologists but also to ecologists, archeologists, geographers, and . others whose studies reach back into the prehistoric realm. In addition, the increased pace of research upon Pleistocene problems in general, and problems in glacial geology in particular, that has been evident during the last two decades has emphasized the necessity, in this field, of a summary that will be at once a reference to the data already established and a means of indicating the areas and problems in which further research is most needed. These are the principal objectives of the present volume. No one knows better than its author that it falls short of attaining them. Knowledge of the Pleistocene has grown to such an extent that a complete reference work would become an encyclopedia. The consequent necessity for condensation has required the exercise of selective judgment at every turn. The list of references at the end of the book is far from complete, though an earnest effort has been made to see that it is representative. In particular it may lack important titles that have appeared in some countries during the war years and that have not yet been widely distributed. This discussion treats the Pleistocene frankly from the point of view of glaciation, the outstanding characteristic that distinguishes the Pleistocene from the epochs that preceded it. The somewhat cumbersome title was selected with this fact in mind, in an effort not to create the impression that the work is a fully balanced treatment of every phase of the Pleistocene. As is pointed out in Chapter 16, the correlations of Pleistocene events cited and suggested are, as far as possible, those based on geologic evidence rather than on archeologic evidence. In the presentation of geologic evidence itself stream-terrace data are used as little as possible in the belief that this class of data is more frequently subject to faulty interpretation than the data obtained from features of other kinds. In particular this book avoids, in correlation, deduction from any theory of Pleistocene climatic fluctuation which sets up a fixed chronology of events. This conservative attitude is adopted on the principle that only when the stratigraphic column is built up strictly on geologic evidence can the influence of prejudice in favor of a particular theory of climate be avoided. To enable the reader to evaluate the reliability of the data used, a continuous effort has been made to discriminate between reasoning by induction from field evidence and reasoning by deduction from assumed general conditions.'
Author: C. Britt Bousman
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603447601
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
The end of the Pleistocene era brought dramatic environmental changes to small bands of humans living in North America: changes that affected subsistence, mobility, demography, technology, and social relations. The transition they made from Paleoindian (Pleistocene) to Archaic (Early Holocene) societies represents the first major cultural shift that took place solely in the Americas. This event—which manifested in ways and at times much more varied than often supposed—set the stage for the unique developments of behavioral complexity that distinguish later Native American prehistoric societies. Using localized studies and broad regional syntheses, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the diversity of adaptations to the dynamic and changing environmental and cultural landscapes that occurred between the Pleistocene and early portion of the Holocene. The authors' research areas range from Northern Mexico to Alaska and across the continent to the American Northeast, synthesizing the copious available evidence from well-known and recent excavations.With its methodologically and geographically diverse approach, From the Pleistocene to the Holocene: Human Organization and Cultural Transformations in Prehistoric North America provides an overview of the present state of knowledge regarding this crucial transformative period in Native North America. It offers a large-scale synthesis of human adaptation, reflects the range of ideas and concepts in current archaeological theoretical approaches, and acts as a springboard for future explanations and models of prehistoric change.
Author: Anthony D. Barnosky
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520240820
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
Annotation Fossil finds from 10 years of research show the effects of climate change on North American mammals during the Pleistocene era, about one million to 400,000 years ago.
