The Sediments of Time

The Sediments of Time PDF Author: Meave Leakey
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 0358206677
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
Meave Leakey's thrilling, high-stakes memoir--written with her daughter Samira--encapsulates her distinguished life and career on the front lines of the hunt for our human origins, a quest made all the more notable by her stature as a woman in a highly competitive, male-dominated field.

The Sediments of Time

The Sediments of Time PDF Author: Meave Leakey
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 0358206677
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
Meave Leakey's thrilling, high-stakes memoir--written with her daughter Samira--encapsulates her distinguished life and career on the front lines of the hunt for our human origins, a quest made all the more notable by her stature as a woman in a highly competitive, male-dominated field.

Sediments of Time

Sediments of Time PDF Author: Reinhart Koselleck
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503605973
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Sediments of Time features the most important essays by renowned German historian Reinhart Koselleck not previously available in English, several of them essential to his theory of history. The volume sheds new light on Koselleck's crucial concerns, including his theory of sediments of time; his theory of historical repetition, duration, and acceleration; his encounters with philosophical hermeneutics and political and legal thought; his concern with the limits of historical meaning; and his views on historical commemoration, including that of the Second World War and the Holocaust. A critical introduction addresses some of the challenges and potentials of Koselleck's reception in the Anglophone world.

Fossil Men

Fossil Men PDF Author: Kermit Pattison
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006241030X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
"Riveting. ... Pattison's uncanny ability [is] to write evocatively about science. ... In this, he is every bit as good as the best scientist writers." —New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) "Brilliant. ... A work of staggering depth." —Minneapolis Star Tribune A decade in the making, Fossil Men is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body: the first full-length account of the discovery of a startlingly unpredicted human ancestor more than a million years older than Lucy It is the ultimate mystery: where do we come from? In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White uncovered a set of ancient bones in Ethiopia’s Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the resulting skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus—nicknamed “Ardi”—was an astounding 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than the world-famous “Lucy.” The team spent the next 15 years studying the bones in strict secrecy, all while continuing to rack up landmark fossil discoveries in the field and becoming increasingly ensnared in bitter disputes with scientific peers and Ethiopian bureaucrats. When finally revealed to the public, Ardi stunned scientists around the world and challenged a half-century of orthodoxy 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. But the discovery of Ardi wasn’t just a leap forward in understanding the roots of humanity--it was an attack on scientific convention and the leading authorities of human origins, triggering an epic feud about the oldest family skeleton. In Fossil Men, acclaimed journalist Kermit Pattison brings us a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including White, an uncompromising perfectionist whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant whose deep expertise about teeth rivaled anyone on Earth; Owen Lovejoy, a onetime creationist-turned-paleoanthropologist with radical insights into human locomotion; Berhane Asfaw, who survived imprisonment and torture to become Ethiopia’s most senior paleoanthropologist; Don Johanson, the discoverer of Lucy, who had a rancorous falling out with the Ardi team; and the Leakeys, for decades the most famous family in paleoanthropology. Based on a half-decade of research in Africa, Europe and North America, Fossil Men is not only a brilliant investigation into the origins of the human lineage, but the oldest of human emotions: curiosity, jealousy, perseverance and wonder.

Geochemical Sediments and Landscapes

Geochemical Sediments and Landscapes PDF Author: David J. Nash
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444399675
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
This state-of-the-art volume reviews both past work and current research, with contributions from internationally recognized experts. The book is organized into fourteen chapters and designed to embrace the full range of terrestrial geochemical sediments. An up-to-date and comprehensive survey of research in the field of geochemical sediments and landscapes Discusses the main duricrusts, including calcrete, laterite and silcrete Considers deposits precipitated in various springs, lakes, caves and near-coastal environments Considers the range of techniques used in the analysis of geochemical sediments, representing a significant advance on previous texts

Sedimentary Petrology

Sedimentary Petrology PDF Author: Maurice E. Tucker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118698908
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The earlier editions of this book have been used by successivegenerations of students for more than 20 years, and it is thestandard text on the subject in most British universities and manyothers throughout the world. The study of sediments and sedimentary rocks continues to be acore topic in the Earth Sciences and this book aims to provide aconcise account of their composition, mineralogy, textures,structures, diagenesis and depositional environments. This latest edition is noteworthy for the inclusion of 16 plateswith 54 colour photomicrographs of sedimentary rocks inthin-section. These bring sediments to life and show their beautyand colorful appearance down the microscope; they will aid thestudent enormously in laboratory petrographic work. The text hasbeen revised where necessary and the reference and further readinglists brought up-to-date. New tables have been included to helpundergraduates with rock and thin-section description andinterpretation. New 16-page colour section will mean students do not need tobuy Longman Atlas All illustrations redrawn to higher standard Complete revision of text - new material on sedimentarygeochemistry, etc

Annals of the Former World

Annals of the Former World PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708460
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World. Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction. Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

Ancient Bones

Ancient Bones PDF Author: Madelaine Böhme
Publisher: Greystone Books Ltd
ISBN: 1771647523
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
"Splendid and important... Scientifically rigorous and written with a clarity and candor that create a gripping tale... [Böhme's] account of the history of Europe's lost apes is imbued with the sweat, grime, and triumph that is the lot of the fieldworker, and carries great authority." —Tim Flannery, The New York Review of Books In this "fascinating forensic inquiry into human origins" (Kirkus STARRED Review), a renowned paleontologist takes readers behind-the-scenes of one of the most groundbreaking archaeological digs in recent history. Somewhere west of Munich, paleontologist Madelaine Böhme and her colleagues dig for clues to the origins of humankind. What they discover is beyond anything they ever imagined: the twelve-million-year-old bones of Danuvius guggenmosi make headlines around the world. This ancient ape defies prevailing theories of human history—his skeletal adaptations suggest a new common ancestor between apes and humans, one that dwelled in Europe, not Africa. Might the great apes that traveled from Africa to Europe before Danuvius's time be the key to understanding our own origins? All this and more is explored in Ancient Bones. Using her expertise as a paleoclimatologist and paleontologist, Böhme pieces together an awe-inspiring picture of great apes that crossed land bridges from Africa to Europe millions of years ago, evolving in response to the challenging conditions they found. She also takes us behind the scenes of her research, introducing us to former theories of human evolution (complete with helpful maps and diagrams), and walks us through musty museum overflow storage where she finds forgotten fossils with yellowed labels, before taking us along to the momentous dig where she and the team unearthed Danuvius guggenmosi himself—and the incredible reverberations his discovery caused around the world. Praise for Ancient Bones: "Readable and thought-provoking. Madelaine Böhme is an iconoclast whose fossil discoveries have challenged long-standing ideas on the origins of the ancestors of apes and humans." —Steve Brusatte, New York Times-bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs "An inherently fascinating, impressively informative, and exceptionally thought-provoking read." —Midwest Book Review "An impressive introduction to the burgeoning recalibration of paleoanthropology." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Critique and Crisis

Critique and Crisis PDF Author: Reinhart Koselleck
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262611572
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Critique and Crisis established Reinhart Koselleck's reputation as the most important German intellectual historian of the postwar period. This first English translation of Koselleck's tour de force demonstrates a chronological breadth, a philosophical depth, and an originality which are hardly equalled in any scholarly domain. It is a history of the Enlightenment in miniature, fundamental to our understanding of that period and its consequences. Like Tocqueville, Koselleck views Enlightenment intellectuals as an uprooted, unrealistic group of onlookers who sowed the seeds of the modern political tensions that first flowered in the French Revolution. He argues that it was the split that developed between state and society during the Enlightenment that fostered the emergence of this intellectual elite divorced from the realities of politics. Koselleck describes how this disjunction between political authority proper and its subjects led to private spheres that later became centers of moral authority and, eventually, models for political society that took little or no notice of the constraints under which politicians must inevitably work. In this way progressive bourgeois philosophy, which seemed to offer the promise of a unified and peaceful world, in fact produced just the opposite. The book provides a wealth of examples drawn from all of Europe to illustrate the still relevant message that we evade the constraints and the necessities of the political realm at our own risk. Critique and Crisis is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Transfixed by Prehistory

Transfixed by Prehistory PDF Author: Maria Stavrinaki
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 194213066X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
An examination of how modern art was impacted by the concept of prehistory and the prehistoric Prehistory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. In that moment of technological progress and acceleration of production and circulation, three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to surmise the age of the Earth; second, to find the point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki considers the inseparability of these accounts of temporality from the disruptive forces of modernity. She asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if considered through these three interwoven inventions of the longue durée. Transfixed by Prehistory attempts to articulate such a history, which turns out to be more complex than an inevitable march of progress leading up to the Anthropocene. Rather, it is a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration, and incessant invention, since the “new” was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed of as much speed as slowness, as much change as deep time, as much confidence as skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be rethought. Stavrinaki focuses on this intrinsic tension through major artistic practices (Cézanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and Jünger), and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology.

Sky Time in Gray's River

Sky Time in Gray's River PDF Author: Robert Michael Pyle
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640092781
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
An ecologist reflects on the natural wonders of the Pacific Northwest as he describes the lives of plants, animals, and humans through every season of the year during his thirty years in the village of Gray's River, near the mouth of the Columbia River--long out of print, this classic of nature writing is being given a new life in trade paperback with a new afterword by the author. Sky Time in Gray's River is an elegant meditation on life in the rural Northwest. Although Robert Michael Pyle is a lepidopterist, and southwestern Washington is notable for its lack of butterflies, something about the Gray's River Valley spoke to him when he visited more than forty years ago. Since then he has lived near the village of Gray's River, one of the first to be established near the mouth of the Columbia River and only tenuously connected to the world of the twenty-first century. Pyle brings Gray's River to life by compressing those forty years into twelve chapters, following the lives of the people, plants, and animals that make this valley their home, month by month through the seasons. Through his loving portrait of one riverside village, Pyle illustrates how a special place can transform anyone lucky enough to find it. He shows that you don't have to travel far to see something new every day--if you know how to look.