Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, one of my majors in undergrad was anthropology, and a nonfiction book covering the oldest human skeleton, as well as the “fossil hunters” involved in lifelong searches, is my cup of tea, especially when it’s this well-written and exciting. The drama present in the scientific community also kept me flipping the pages. ? <br /><br />Really, though, the heart of the book is the fossils and science involved, which the author tackled in a riveting and approachable way for the reader. Fossil Men is about the search for the beginning of our species, and it reads like one of those most compelling mysteries I’ve ever picked up!<br /><br />I received a gifted copy. <br /><br />Many of my reviews can also be found on my blog: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.jennifertarheelreader.com">www.jennifertarheelreader.com</a> and instagram: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.instagram.com/tarheelreader">www.instagram.com/tarheelreader</a>

When I was a kid, I sometimes enjoyed digging in the dirt in hopes of finding buried treasure or dinosaur bones or ancient Native American artifacts. I never found anything though. Perhaps I didn't dig deep enough or long enough or, more likely, there just wasn't anything to be found in the first place. <br><br><img src="https://images.gr-assets.com/hostedimages/1628175491ra/31735615.gif" width="250" height="166.67" alt="Fail Baby GIF - Fail Baby FunnyFail GIFs" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br>Eventually I tired of digging holes in search of lost gold or T. rex's cousin. It was boring to dig and not find anything. I wasn't archaeologist material. I didn't have the patience. After five or ten minutes my interest would wane and I'd give up. Finding ancient relics and bones and coins would be fun, but actually looking for them was not.<br><br>I was reminded of this reading <i>Fossil Men</i>. As exciting as archaeological finds are, much of the work is boring. <br><br>Had I paid attention to the title, I would have known this wasn't the best book for me. I don't care about the day-to-day life and professional skirmishes of archaeologists. I care about their <i>findings</i>, not about the tiny details that go into their big discoveries.<br><br>I found myself skimming large portions of this book. I wanted to read solely about Ardi (<i>Ardipithecus ramidus</i>), a human ancestor found in Ethiopia who lived about 4.4 million years ago. <br><br>Unfortunately for me, the majority of this book is about the professionals - their lives, their fights with each other, their quests to discover bones and learn what they can from them. <br><br>It's very well researched and written and those who enjoy learning those details will love this book. For me, it was tedious. If the book was solely about evolution, Ardi, and other human ancestors, I would have loved it. But I could have done without 75% of it. I wanted science and there's little to be found.<br><br>However, I did learn a few things about Ethiopia and Ardi and human evolution so it wasn't a total washout. A few interesting tidbits:<br><br>•"Ethiopian languages are written in Ge’ez, an ancient script used nowhere else in the planet."<br><br>•"More than any other tooth, canines reveal sexual differences because males have bigger fangs than females."<br><br>•Ardi's "upper half seemed designed for walking upright while the apelike lower half seemed built for climbing."<br><br>•"Ardi and humans descended from a palm-walking Miocene ape, not a knuckle walker."<br><br>•"Cockroaches and even some lizards can run on two legs." <br><br>3 stars is all I can muster. Too much time spent digging is not fun for me.

First things first: Kermit Pattison has a great career ahead of him. This is his first book and it is full of interest, written clearly, and he's picked a fascinating subject which he covers thoroughly.<br /><br />But.<br /><br /><i>Fossil Men</i> is the most appropriate title imaginable, because Tim White, Owen Lovejoy, and many (though not all) of the team involved in the Ardipithecus discovery are fossils. Likely without even realizing, Pattison has written a book that proves to be deeply troubling.<br /><br />The first roughly half of the book is able to gloss over White's personality or lack of same, as Pattison is setting up the story with the background, in particular White's cooperation with other paleoanthropologists as he worked towards becoming established and recognized in the field. Paleoanthropologists are much like paleontologists on steroids: every single discovery is inevitably trumpeted to be a direct human ancestor in the quest for limited government and private support. White certainly learned how to play that game and he became the master of it.<br /><br />Much about Tim White's work in Ethiopia is exceptionally praiseworthy: he took great pains to establish Ethiopians in his field of work, and to support the national museum in becoming a well equipped center for preservation, preparation, and study of fossils. His personality lent itself brilliantly to running organized and efficient expeditions, and in making both best use of field time and pulling as much data as possible out of an area, and all this in a country that remains dangerous to work in. <br /><br />But.<br /><br />Then came Ardipithecus. "Ardi" is a train wreck of a fossil, smashed to pieces, yet compellingly complete ("complete" in fossil hominin terms - a lot of it is missing, but there was enough material from this skeleton and other finds to create a likely reconstruction), with features that suggest it may be well in the human lineage, and it is considerably older than Don Johanson's Australopithecus afarensis ("Lucy"). White's team, over several seasons, did a masterful job in hoovering up not only the main specimen, they were able to collect a lot of pieces and parts of others. They were sitting on a gold mine of information not only on a potential human relative or ancestor, but the world it had lived and died in.<br /><br />And then they sat on it. And sat, and sat, and sat.<br /><br />White argues that the over 10 years it took to publish the fossil was largely due to the time needed to prepare and study what was indeed a badly damaged collection of scraps. I would agree that that was partly true. But the behavior of White and his team in the meantime was ugly. A total veil of silence dropped over their finds. One of the most grotesque episodes in the book has White and team flying in the Getty private 727 - the Gettys were private sponsors of his work - all over the world looking at comparative specimens, and at the same time not sharing their own work, at all. This was not the only example of this behavior: it was consistent until the specimen was published in <i>Science</i> in a series of articles that the Ardi team evidently were able to cherry-pick the reviewers of to make sure no critics had a chance to express doubts.<br /><br />This is not science. In particular it is not government-funded science. While the Gettys did throw in some money, most of White's work was financed by the US taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation. That implies, to me at least, that you'll both publish in a reasonable amount of time and share your data.<br /><br />I get the impression Pattison was untroubled by this, since he treats White's detractors in a semi-dismissive fashion, or perhaps he <i>had</i> to be untroubled to get the book finished. All in all this is good reading, but in some ways it's a very disturbing book.

This book tells an intriguing story of our distant ancestors, along with the evolving interpretations of which bones should be considered as members of our family tree. Our understanding has come a long way since the early visions of ape-men, and the story has taken some interesting twists and turns. Paleoanthropology is an exacting profession, with painstaking reconstructions that take years to complete. It is also more than science, it is interpretation and sometimes conjecture. At one point the author of this book makes a comment that could have come directly from Thomas S. Kuhn’s seminal 1962 book <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>: “it was a classic clash of scientific worldviews. Science is not just a quest for new facts; it also is a contest between rival models for interpreting nature.”<br /><br />The idea of rivalry between scientists looms large in this book, sometimes overshadowing the science itself. It was done, no doubt, to add a human dimension to the story to make it more than just bones and analysis. Maybe these guys have been in the equitorial sun too long, but they seem to spend as much time bickering with each other as they do studying the fossils. Although the author never explicitly says so, I suspect he was fed up with them by the time he finished his research, because he recounts their quarrels in cringe-inducing detail, describing the pettiness, jealousy, and back-stabbing like a daytime soap opera.<br /><br />Make no mistake, these people are brilliant, insanely hardworking, and passionately devoted to advancing our knowledge of the origins of humankind. Their inductive abilities verge on the miraculous: at one point a cast of a partially exposed foot bone, the size of the little fingernail on one’s hand, was found to be a key piece of evidence in understanding how early hominins walked. And it’s not just hype that, to the right expert, a single tooth can reveal its owner’s place in the evolutionary line, along with its age, diet, and whether it was primarily arboreal or terrestrial. A tiny skull fragment can tell whether the species walked on two legs or four, and a bone the size of a small pebble was crucial for understanding whether one potential ancestor knuckle-walked or strode upright.<br /><br /><i>Fossil Men</i> wraps its story around the discovery of Ardipithecus and the long process by which it gradually came to be accepted by most paleoanthropologists as a member of the human lineage rather than one of the many species of ancient apes. The first bones were found in 1994, of a 4.4 million year old female. For comparison, the better-known Lucy is 3.2 million years old, and the more recent Homo naledi from South Africa is now dated at 236,000-335,000 years old, just about the time Homo sapiens was splitting off from Homo erectus.<br /><br />In Southern Africa fossils are often found in caves, but in East Africa where “Ardi” was discovered, they are found on the ground, in pieces, lots of tiny pieces that have been brought to the surface through erosion or ground faulting. Some of the fragmentation is the result of expansion and contraction as dry and wet seasons alternate, but much of the damage came from scavengers immediately after death. Animals fell where they died, and scavengers were quick to move in. “Feet are rare in the fossil record. Extremities are filled with tasty ligaments and muscles, like a handout for scavengers: eat me.”<br /><br />The book is also a good primer on what a field expedition is actually like. Even when not being menaced by the local natives, stone age warriors with automatic weapons, it is grueling work. Despite whatever romantic notions you might have about finding a key piece of evolutionary evidence, this is not a place most of us would want to be, spending all day in the dirt under a blazing sun. The work is always hard, often crawling uphill on all fours, and once a promising site is found, with the potential to yield more bone fragments, the precision becomes extreme:<br /><blockquote><br />Millimeter by millimeter, the excavators reduced the mound with scrapers, dental tools, porcupine quills, and dust brushes. Each person spent an entire day picking away at a section not much bigger than a laptop computer. By sundown, they had gone down only one or two centimeters. All brushed soil was carried to a sieve station to catch every scrap.<br /></blockquote><br />When people talk about the Last Common Ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, the word “ape-like” is often used, but one of the themes of this book is that Ardipithecus, with its mixture of ancient and modern features, shows that we need to reexamine that idea. “Suddenly the living African apes seemed outliers. Modern apes were not faithful relics of our common ancestors. Instead, they evolved into specialized creatures after their common ancestors with humans.” Ardi had the curved fingers and opposable big toes of apes, but walked upright, a creature neither fully arboreal not fully terrestrial. The old assumption was that our common ancestor knuckle-walked like modern chimpanzees, but perhaps an upright gait is actually the older trait. “Living apes differ greatly in social structures, limb proportions, and even styles of knuckle walking—all of which suggested they became highly specialized after splitting from our common ancestors.”<br /><br />Paleoanthropolgy is a fast-evolving discipline, and each new find can re-write the book on mankind’s ancestors. Jared Diamond published <i>The Third Chimpanzee</i> in 1991, describing human evolution in terms of what was known then. It is a fine book, but so much has changed since he wrote that it now feels as ancient as the bones it describes. <i>Fossil Men</i> is a good up to date account of the evidence as it stands today, but in another year or two it too may be made obsolete by new finds.

Who were these people? The ones who lived in a world populated by animals whose fossils were displayed at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History; the ones who fashioned the Native American relics his father brought home from a road excavation. Tim White was always traveling in his imagination back in time. As a teen he was fascinated by F. Clark Howell's <u>Early Man</u>, part of the Time-Life Nature Library series. Later, he would read about the Leakey discoveries from the pages of <u>National Geographic</u>. <br /><br />The illustration “March of Progress” depicting human evolution by Rudolph Zallinger from <u>Early Man</u> is still iconic. Simple. Intuitive. But wrong, just like most of what we thought we knew about human evolution from catchphrases like “the Missing Link” or later, “Mitochondrial Eve.” White was a key figure in shattering these paradigms. <br /><br />White led a succession of digs in the Afar Depression, the triangular area where three tectonic plates meet at the northeast tail of the Great Rift Valley. It's safe to assume he never said to himself: “Yes, I want to go to war-torn Ethiopia to a remote region plagued by intertribal warfare, venomous snakes, prowling jackals, unpredictable floods, and scalding summers to dig." What is remarkable is that he didn't care about any of this. He wanted to find the oldest human fossil, and the Afar Depression was the most promising location to find it. <br /><br />In 1994 his team struck paydirt. They unearthed a fossil 4.4 million years old. Up to that time, the oldest fossil was “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis), excavated two decades previously by Donald Johanson. “Lucy” was estimated to be 3.2 million years old. Eventually, White would conclude that his fossil “Ardi” represented a new genus which he called Ardipithecus ramidus. Her age alone was enticing. Human ancestry might one day be pushed back from the Pliocene (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago) all the way back to the Miocene (23 to 5.3 million years ago). More eye-opening, however, were the revelations that would take 15 years of careful study, conjecture, and confirmation before being openly published. Ardi's forelimbs were shorter than her legs. Her toes were opposable, consistent with a climber. The spine was upright indicating bipedal locomotion. Diamond-shaped canines that were not self-sharpening were characteristic of humans, not apes. Her habitat was unclear. Woodland? Savannah? Both? <i> “The climate and botany of eastern Africa cycled back and forth in a very spiky fashion between wet periods when huge lakes formed in the rift valley, dry periods when dust collected on the coastal seafloor, and sometimes perplexingly both at the same time....The quest for a master narrative of climate-driven human evolution remains unfulfilled.”</i> (p.220)<br /><br />The range of specialized expertise tapped to support these conclusions was staggering. Geology of the Ethiopian rift system and in particular of the Afar Depression (Giday WoldeGabriel, Berhane Asfaw, and Maurice Taieb), isotope decay geochronology and genomic biology (Stan Ambrose), paleoanatomy, comparative anatomy and biomechanics (Owen Lovejoy, Gen Suwa and Scott Simpson), foot anatomy (Bruce Latimer), paleolithic archaeology (Yonas Beyene), paleobotany, and comparative genomics. <br /><br />Instead of a “missing link,” some scientists now speak of “ghost lineages.” Geneticist David Reich states: <i> “Within human populations, there is no simple tree....Instead, the truth is it's more like a trellis with mixing, remixing, and separation again and again going back into deep time.”</i> (p.403)<br /><br />Tim White is an iconoclast. He was never cowed by those adhering to conventional wisdom or the criticisms of well-regarded colleagues. His impatience and lack of diplomacy ignited animosities which author Kermit Pattison felt obligated to detail along with opposing interpretations of White's find. The result is a balanced but often meandering narrative. Also interspersed are mini-biographies of the many researchers whom White worked with. Nevertheless, this was a thought-provoking and exhaustive update to the story of human evolution.

This fascinating book is about paleoanthropologist Tim White, and his team's discovery of Ardi--short for Ardipithecus ramidus. Tim White had a reputation--a pretty bad reputation, actually--of being a very blunt, salty, arrogant scientist. But he was the most learned, obsessive, meticulous, aggressive, and far-seeing scientist of his time. He really and truly "knew his stuff". <br /><br />Every year during the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's, Tim White participated in or led an expedition to East Africa. At first he worked with Richard Leakey in Kenya, and then worked primarily in Ethiopia. He searched for fossils of early hominids; the ancestors of modern humans. This was not easy work. First, he had to obtain grant money to fund the expeditions and research. Then he had to go through a maze of bureaucrats in Ethiopia to get permission to search in a certain area. This could take months or even years, as Ethiopia went through political turmoil. Then, after finally getting all set up, he would take a caravan of vehicles on a several-day trip through the desert. He went through the homelands of various warring tribes, and sometimes had to dodge bullets and deal with gun-crazy people!<br /><br />White found the remains of Ardi, a 4.4-million year old set of fossils that predated the bones of "Lucy". He began studying the fossil remains for many years. He was meticulous, and documented every nuance and detail from his very incomplete collection of fossil bones. He deduced that Ardi was bipedal--she was an upright walker--even though she could also grab onto tree branches. White deduced from multiple clues, that modern humans are more closely related to Ardi than to modern apes. When he finally published his findings, the scientific community was aghast. They just did not believe White--they didn't <i>want</i> to believe him! The scientific community criticized White--perhaps just as much because of White's personality, as his paradigm-shifting views. <br /><br />It took many years for scientists to finally recognize how correct White had been. The book mentions the aphorism that "science advances when old professors die." In this case, it is probably true. <br /><br />The most interesting parts of the book, are those that describe the detective work that scientists performed, to discover the secrets of the origin of humans. It was also engaging to hear how expeditions faced danger and desert heat to uncover the tiny fossil fragments. I highly recommend this book!<br /><br />Oh--I did not read this book. I listened to the audiobook, narrated extremely well by Roger Wayne. He spoke so well that I could distinguish who was speaking, just from listening to his voice. What a delight!

This is one of those books where I don’t remember <em>how</em> it came to be on my to-read list, but I’m glad it did. <cite>Fossil Men</cite> is a book about science and history—both subjects I adore in my non-fiction reading—in a somewhat niche subject of paleoanthropology. Indeed, I wouldn’t describe this as a “pop science” book, which is usually the type of scientific non-fiction I read. Kermit Pattison, while not himself a scientist, has spent so many years on his research for this subject that he ends up presenting a text that goes far deeper than most popular accounts. While still comprehensible to laypeople like myself, the more you know about theories of evolution, paleoanthropology, etc., then the more enticing this book will be for you. As it is, I really enjoyed learning more both about this scientific discipline and what it might be teaching us about our deep, deep past as a species.<br><br><cite>Fossil Men</cite> focuses mainly on the Middle Awash team of paleoanthropologists and related people—so named for the region of Ethiopia in which this team found the first fossils of <i>Ardipithecus ramidus</i>. This team, led by prickly paleoanthropologist Tim White, claimed that “Ardi” was the oldest ancestor of modern humans then discovered and indicated a link between modern humans and our more ancient ancestors, whom scientists until now assumed must be more similar to modern chimpanzees. The catch? The Middle Awash team found Ardi in 1994, yet they didn’t publish any major findings for <strong>fifteen years</strong>. Since then, the significance of Ardi and similar new fossil findings has been a subject of major dispute. What Pattison contends in this book is that these debates and controversies are, perhaps unsurprisingly, as much a result of clashing egos and human fallibility as they are a search for scientific truth. This, to me, was the main lure of <cite>Fossil Men</cite> (yeah, that’s right, I am a whore for that juicy science drama).<br><br>Pattison organizes his account in roughly chronological detail. The exception is when he dives into the past for half a chapter or so in order to explore the history of particular people of note. I found this organizational method very easy to follow. Pattison carefully charts the relationships among the most famous and well-known fossil hunters, like Tim White and the various Leakeys, or White’s estranged protégé, Don Johanson. Moreover, he ties the people to places—most notably when discussing how successive periods of political unrest in Ethiopia made it impossible for foreign paleoanthropologists to dig and also threatened the lives and livelihood of Ethiopian paleoanthropologists.<br><br>I appreciate that Pattison takes the time to highlight the colonial, Western domination of this field. For a scientific discipline depending on fossils that mostly come from Africa, the field is incredibly white (and male, something Pattison also points out). Pattison lauds White and a few others for opening doors, for making the training of Indigenous anthropologists part and parcel of their projects. And I like that, even as we learn of the oppressive and authoritarian actions of some of the Ethiopian regimes, Pattison reminds us that the country has every right to be suspicious of foreign scientists and officials extracting fossils and exploiting Ethiopia for such discoveries without giving back. In this way, Pattison touches on something that I think is well known within science but needs to be discussed far, far more often: the <em>practice</em> of science is racist and colonial, and we can’t justify continuing such practices in the name of “progress.” We need to rethink how we science, especially in the field, and who is doing the sciencing.<br><br>If we are rethinking this, of course, then we should also probably think about personalities and policies. Pattison doesn’t just give us a window into evolutionary history—he also shows us how hiring and admissions policies at universities, along with grant policies for institutions like the National Science Foundation in the United States, can make or break someone’s career. Similarly, his portrait of Tim White is multi-dimensional, emphasizing the man’s incredible adherence to what he perceives as “good science” and a hard work ethic, while simultaneously admitting the various judgments of colleagues and former friends who call him difficult to work with, impossible, infuriating. Should we laud and encourage a scientist with such personality issues? Or are we better off encouraging scientists who collaborate and avoid conflict? On one hand, we definitely need to avoid the excuse that “he’s difficult to work with, but he’s a genius so put up with it” (somehow almost exclusively applied to white cis men). On the other hand, constructive disagreement is an important part of doing good science. Pattison touches on—but doesn’t quite go on a tangent to discuss, which is fine—the fact that, in the past half-century, we have started to interrogate our assumptions underpinning what “science” should be. Just as the twentieth century saw science migrate from the domain of wealthy individuals to a concentrated group of wealthy academic institutions, hopefully the twenty-first century will bring a similar paradigm shift in the structural nature of science.<br><br>Ok, ok—but what of the evolutionary science aspect of the book? How was that, Kara?<br><br>It was brilliant. I learned so much from <cite>Fossil Men</cite> (and probably forgot half of it by now, lol). I can remember throughout my childhood a similar fascination as the one Pattison recounts in people like Tim White: I would eat up books and <cite>National Geographic</cite> magazines and even documentaries all about our evolutionary history. I remember whispering to myself the names of extinct genuses and species: <i>Homo erectus</i>, <i>Homo habilis</i>, <i>Australopithecus</i>, as if such incantation would reveal the secrets of our past to my 12-year-old self. Science never held much allure for me as a career or a calling, but I thirsted to learn more about these things. I remember the special on <i>Homo naledi</i>, the shift from hominid to hominin, etc. So this book really satisfies that thirst for me.<br><br>What I took away from this, thanks to Pattison’s careful storytelling, is the utter complexity of this field. It is <em>not</em> as simple as our textbooks and magazines pronounce—White laments through Pattison that these publications often rely on the initial announcements scientists make to get the jump on others for credit, and they seldom incorporate the retractions and corrections that follow those announcements in the years to come. So the picture we get in school and on TV is often incomplete and out of date, and scientists working in the field know about it, but we don’t get to see all the debates going on. This makes me wonder about the role of science communication in all this, and whether there are better ways to discussing these ideas in the open….<br><br>Anyway, I learned from <cite>Fossil Men</cite> that our common ancestors with chimps and other apes might not have been chimp-like. They might have been bipedal and more like us, and it might be chimpanzees, gorillas, etc., whose ancestors, having split from our common one, evolved along the lines we now see these species representing. That seems to have upset a lot of long-held theories in paleoanthropology, so it’s cool to hear Pattison explain how people like Gen Suwa and Owen Lovejoy were able to piece together this possible explanation based on teeth and bones and all sorts of other expertise. Again, I’m just filled with this admiration and awe for the work that scientists do to try to uncover things about our distant past. They don’t always (maybe even seldom) get it right or get the whole story, but it’s undeniable that in the past centuries we have gone from knowing almost nothing about the origins of our species to having a great many plausible theories.<br><br>If you like science but more importantly like stories about how science is done, you will like <cite>Fossil Men</cite>. At times technical, at times biographical, at times political, this book is far more than a “here’s how they did it,” and it preserves the awesomeness of these discoveries without lionizing the discoverers. Pattison ultimately concludes that science is a tenacious and enduring process, yet the scientists themselves are fallible.<br><br>Originally posted on <a href="https://kara.reviews/fossil-men/" rel="nofollow noopener">Kara.Reviews</a>, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter.<br><br><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/" rel="nofollow noopener"> <img alt="Creative Commons BY-NC License" width="88" height="31" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1388723110i/7909581.png" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"> </a>

Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind by Kermit Pattison: A group led by the renowned fossil-hunter Tim White discovered a skeleton in the Afar region of Ethiopia in the mid-1990’s that significantly altered scientists’ understanding of human origins, but simultaneously triggered a seismic rift in the scientific community over the true origins of humanity. Based on the radiometric dating of nearby rocks, the group determined that the bones were 4.4 million years old, making Ardi (as they nicknamed the bones) a full million years older than “Lucy”, the previous oldest-known skeleton. In riveting detail, Pattison brings to life the discovery and the resulting drama in the scientific community and demonstrates the importance of science in helping human’s understand their origins.<br /><br />Listen to my author interviews here: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.thoughtsfromapage.com">https://www.thoughtsfromapage.com</a>, and for more of my reviews, check out my Instagram account: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.instagram.com/thoughtsfromapage/">https://www.instagram.com/thoughtsfro...</a>.

This was incredible. I am not particularly interested in hominin evolution—I inevitably skip over those articles in Nature or National Geographic. But Pattison does a fantastic job explaining the science—not just telling us the results, but going over the entire process including politics and personalities. The central character, Tim White, is particularly well drawn, in a complex way. He has strengths, such as his dedication to his work and to Ethiopian colleagues. But he also has tragic weaknesses, such as a hardheadedness and perfectionism that leads him to keep skeletons and data away from other researchers. <br /><br />The book is also very well illustrated. <br /><br />&gt; "A few people go out and risk their necks and spend the time to get the fossils," White vented in 2000. "The people who sit in the labs—they're the 95 percent—they're doing the reviewing of grants. They don't understand the field work, but they do understand one thing—the sooner they can get their hands on the fossils that are found the greater the chance there is that they will be able to extract some analytical information out of them, which they can then publish and enhance their own career. And so they dedicate themselves to trying to take fossils out of the hands of those who find them."<br />

This book covers all we need to know about the fossils of early men, the ancestors of Homo sapiens, us. The author tries to answer the below questions. From where actually we came from? Does we and apes share a common ancestor? What happened to the other species of homo genus? <br />The almost of an answer is, whether we are white or black, whether we are dwarf or taller, whether we are Chinese or Indians, whether we are Hindus, Christians Muslims or Buddhist, we all came from Ardipithecus Ramidus &gt;, Australopithecus Afarensis &gt;, Homo sapiens.<br />We were all ape like species a millions of years before and evolved to form a being like us with large brains and thinking ability. God knows how we are gonna evolve after the next millions of years !!!