Download or read book Death As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal written by Juan José Millás and published by Scribe Publications. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling follow-up to Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal. ‘We would love to discover that each species has a biological clock in its cells, because, if that clock existed and if we were able to find it, perhaps we could stop it and thus become eternal,’ Arsuaga tells Millás in this book, in which science is intertwined with literature. The paleontologist reveals essential aspects of our existence to the writer, and debates the advisability of transmitting his random vision of life to a dieting Millás, who discovers that old age is a country in which he still feels like a foreigner. After the extraordinary international reception of Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal, the most brilliant double act in Spanish literature once again dazzle the reader by addressing topics such as death and eternity, longevity, disease, ageing, natural selection, programmed death, and survival. Here you will find humour, biology, nature, life, a lot of life … and two fascinating characters, the Sapiens and the Neanderthal, who surprise us on every page with their sharp reflections on how evolution has treated us as a species. And also as individuals.
Download or read book Kindred written by Rebecca Wragg Sykes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ** WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE 2021 ** 'Beautiful, evocative, authoritative.' Professor Brian Cox 'Important reading not just for anyone interested in these ancient cousins of ours, but also for anyone interested in humanity.' Yuval Noah Harari Kindred is the definitive guide to the Neanderthals. Since their discovery more than 160 years ago, Neanderthals have metamorphosed from the losers of the human family tree to A-list hominins. Rebecca Wragg Sykes uses her experience at the cutting edge of Palaeolithic research to share our new understanding of Neanderthals, shoving aside clichés of rag-clad brutes in an icy wasteland. She reveals them to be curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. Above all, they were successful survivors for more than 300,000 years, during times of massive climatic upheaval. Much of what defines us was also in Neanderthals, and their DNA is still inside us. Planning, co-operation, altruism, craftsmanship, aesthetic sense, imagination, perhaps even a desire for transcendence beyond mortality. Kindred does for Neanderthals what Sapiens did for us, revealing a deeper, more nuanced story where humanity itself is our ancient, shared inheritance.
Download or read book The Last Neanderthal written by Claire Cameron and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Bear, the enthralling story of two women separated by millennia, but linked by an epic journey that will transform them both. Forty thousand years in the past, the last family of Neanderthals roams the earth. After a crushingly hard winter, their numbers are low, but Girl, the oldest daughter, is just coming of age and her family is determined to travel to the annual meeting place and find her a mate. But the unforgiving landscape takes its toll, and Girl is left alone to care for Runt, a foundling of unknown origin. As Girl and Runt face the coming winter storms, Girl realizes she has one final chance to save her people, even if it means sacrificing part of herself. In the modern day, archaeologist Rosamund Gale works well into her pregnancy, racing to excavate newly found Neanderthal artifacts before her baby comes. Linked across the ages by the shared experience of early motherhood, both stories examine the often taboo corners of women's lives. Haunting, suspenseful, and profoundly moving, The Last Neanderthal asks us to reconsider all we think we know about what it means to be human.
Download or read book Ancient Bones written by Madelaine Böhme and published by Greystone Books Ltd. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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)
Download or read book Neanderthal Man written by Svante Pääbo and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A preeminent geneticist, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in medicine, hunts the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes to answer the biggest question of them all: how did our ancestors become human? Neanderthal Man tells the riveting personal and scientific story of the quest to use ancient DNA to unlock the secrets of human evolution. Beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010, Neanderthal Man describes the events, intrigues, failures, and triumphs of these scientifically rich years through the lens of the pioneer and inventor of the field of ancient DNA, Svante Pääbo. We learn that Neanderthal genes offer a unique window into the lives of our ancient relatives and may hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of where language came from as well as why humans survived while Neanderthals went extinct. Pääbo redrew our family tree and permanently changed the way we think about who we are and how we got here. For readers of Richard Dawkins, David Reich, and Hope Jahren, Neanderthal Man is the must-read account of how he did it.
Download or read book From the Shadows written by Juan José Millás and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publishers Weekly “Top 10 Books of the Year” selection From one of Spain’s most original authors comes a wild, absurdist story about a lonely man’s misguided attempts to connect Laid off from his job, Damián Lobo obsessively imagines himself as a celebrity being interviewed on TV. After committing an act of petty theft at an antiques market, he finds himself trapped inside a wardrobe and delivered to the seemingly idyllic home of a husband, wife, and their internet-addicted teenage daughter. There, he sneaks from the shadows to serve as an invisible butler, becoming deeply and disastrously involved with his unknowing host family. Every thread of the plot is ingeniously tied together, creating a potent admixture of parable, love story, and thriller. Millás masterfully reveals the everyday as innately surreal as he renders the unbelievable tangible and the trivial fantastical, and full of dark humor.
Download or read book How To Think Like a Neandertal written by Thomas Wynn and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the authors provide a fascinating narrative of the mental life of Neandertals, to the extent that it can be reconstructed from fossil and archaeological remains.
Download or read book Neanderthal written by Paul Jordan and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2001-02-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Neanderthal man. Was he our direct ancestor, or was he perhaps a more alien figure, genetically very different? This title brings us into the Neanderthal's world, his technology, his way of life, his origins and his relationship with us.
Download or read book The Inheritors written by William Golding and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1962 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A small tribe of Neanderthals find themselves at odds with a tribe comprised of homo sapiens, whose superior intelligence and agility threatens their doom.
Download or read book The Neanderthals Rediscovered How Modern Science Is Rewriting Their Story The Rediscovered Series written by Dimitra Papagianni and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Even-handed, up-to-date, and clearly written. . . . If you want to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of Neanderthal controversies, you’ll find no better guide.” —Brian Fagan, author of Cro-Magnon In recent years, the common perception of the Neanderthal has been transformed thanks to new discoveries and paradigm-shattering scientific innovations. It turns out that the Neanderthals’ behavior was surprisingly modern: they buried the dead, cared for the sick, hunted large animals in their prime, harvested seafood, and spoke. Meanwhile, advances in DNA technologies have forced a reassessment of the Neanderthals’ place in our own past. For hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals evolved in Europe very much in parallel to the Homo sapiens line evolving in Africa, and, when both species made their first forays into Asia, the Neanderthals may even have had the upper hand. Here, Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse look at the Neanderthals through the full dramatic arc of their existence—from their evolution in Europe to their expansion to Siberia, their subsequent extinction, and ultimately their revival in popular novels, cartoons, cult movies, and TV commercials.
Download or read book Them and Us written by Danny Vendramini and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Put aside everything you thought you knew about being human - about how we got here and what it all means. Australian theoretical biologist Danny Vendramini has developed a theory of human origins that is stunning in its simplicity, yet breathtaking in its scope and importance. Them and Us: how Neanderthal predation created modern humans begins with a radical reassessment of Neanderthals. He shows they weren't docile omnivores, but savage, cannibalistic carnivores - top flight predators of the stone age. Neanderthal Predation (NP) theory reveals that Neanderthals were 'apex' predators - who resided at the top of the food chain, and everything else - including humans - was their prey. NP theory is one of those groundbreaking ideas that revolutionizes scientific thinking. It represents a quantum leap in our understanding of human origins.
Download or read book The Humans Who Went Extinct written by Clive Finlayson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2010-11-11 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in hardcover: Oxford; New York: Oxford Universtiy Press, 2009.
Download or read book Neanderthal written by John Darnton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a paleoanthropologist mysteriously disappears in the remote upper regions of the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan, two of his former students, once lovers and now competitors, set off in search of him. Along the way, they make an astounding discovery: a remnant band of Neanderthals, the ancient rivals to Homo sapiens, live on. The shocking find sparks a struggle that replays a conflict from thirty thousand years ago and delves into the heart of modern humanity.
Download or read book Portrait of an Unknown Lady written by Maria Gainza and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice New York Times Notable author María Gainza, who dazzled critics with Optic Nerve, returns with the captivating story of an auction house employee on the trail of an enigmatic master forger In the Buenos Aires art world, a master forger has achieved legendary status. Rumored to be a woman, she specializes in canvases by the painter Mariette Lydis, a portraitist of Argentinean high society. But who is this absurdly gifted creator of counterfeits? What motivates her? And what is her link to the community of artists who congregate, night after night, in a strange establishment called the Hotel Melancólico? On the trail of this mysterious forger is our narrator, an art critic and auction house employee through whose hands counterfeit works have passed. As she begins to take on the role of art-world detective, adopting her own methods of deception and manipulation, she warns us “not to proceed in expectation of names, numbers or dates . . . My techniques are those of the impressionist.” Driven by obsession and full of subtle surprise, Portrait of an Unknown Lady is a highly seductive and enveloping meditation on what we mean by "authenticity" in art, and a captivating exploration of the gap between what is lived and what is told.
Download or read book The Oracle of Night written by Sidarta Ribeiro and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of the human mind told through our experience of dreams—from the earliest accounts to current scientific findings—and their essential role in the formation of who we are and the world we have made. "A resounding case for the mystery, beauty and cognitive importance of dreams." —The New York Times What is a dream? Why do we dream? How do our bodies and minds use them? These questions are the starting point for this unprecedented study of the role and significance of this phenomenon. An investigation on a grand scale, it encompasses literature, anthropology, religion, and science, articulating the essential place dreams occupy in human culture and how they functioned as the catalyst that compelled us to transform our earthly habitat into a human world. From the earliest cave paintings—where Sidarta Ribeiro locates a key to humankind’s first dreams and how they contributed to our capacity to perceive past and future and our ability to conceive of the existence of souls and spirits—to today’s cutting-edge scientific research, Ribeiro arrives at revolutionary conclusions about the role of dreams in human existence and evolution. He explores the advances that contemporary neuroscience, biochemistry, and psychology have made into the connections between sleep, dreams, and learning. He explains what dreams have taught us about the neural basis of memory and the transformation of memory in recall. And he makes clear that the earliest insight into dreams as oracular has been elucidated by contemporary research. Accessible, authoritative, and fascinating, The Oracle of Night gives us a wholly new way to understand this most basic of human experiences.
Download or read book Lone Survivors written by Chris Stringer and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A top researcher proposes a controversial new theory of human evolution in a book “combining the thrill of a novel with a remarkable depth of perspective” (Nature). In this groundbreaking and engaging work of science, world-renowned paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer sets out a new theory of humanity’s origin, challenging both the multiregionalists (who hold that modern humans developed from ancient ancestors in different parts of the world) and his own “out of Africa” theory, which maintains that humans emerged rapidly in one small part of Africa and then spread to replace all other humans within and outside the continent. Stringer’s new theory, based on archeological and genetic evidence, holds that distinct humans coexisted and competed across the African continent—exchanging genes, tools, and behavioral strategies. Stringer draws on analyses of old and new fossils from around the world, DNA studies of Neanderthals (using the full genome map) and other species, and recent archeological digs to unveil his new theory. He shows how the most sensational recent fossil findings fit with his model, and he questions previous concepts (including his own) of modernity and how it evolved. With photographs included, Lone Survivors will be the definitive account of who and what we were—and will change perceptions about our origins and about what it means to be human. “An essential book for anyone interested in psychology, sociology, anthropology, human evolution, or the scientific process.” —Library Journal “Highlights just how many tantalizing discoveries and analytical advances have enriched the field in recent years.” —Literary Review
Download or read book Sapiens written by Yuval Noah Harari and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2015-02-10 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Readers’ Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st Century New York Times Bestseller A Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.” One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us? Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas. Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become? Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.
