From Lucy to Language Unknown - 1996

ISBN: 1868143082
Hardcover, DJ,  1996
272 Pages
Donald Johanson's most famous discovery was Lucy, a proto-human female barely a meter tall and among the first hominids to walk upright (about 3.5 million years ago). This trait distinguished her from her knuckle-walking cousins, the great apes, though she shared their smallish brain. This irrefutably proved that human ancestors had the ability to use their hands before developing the large brains that made abstract thinking possible.This is just one of the fascinating hypotheses that this explorer-scientist relates in this book for general audiences. Paleoanthropologists use the tools of geology and evolutionary biology to study human origins, an approach that has yielded an explosion of discoveries and new techniques that are described in detail. The authors also present the findings beyond the terrain of paleoanthropology, in such disciplines as microbiology, in which the existence of a genetic "Eve" was calculated, the single common ancestor of all… Leer más