Download or read book The Origins of Modern Humans written by Fred H. Smith and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This update to the award-winning The Origins of Modern Humans: A World Survey of the Fossil Evidence covers the most accepted common theories concerning the emergence of modern Homo sapiens adding fresh insight from top young scholars on the key new discoveries of the past 25 years. The Origins of Modern Humans: Biology Reconsidered allows field leaders to discuss and assess the assemblage of hominid fossil material in each region of the world during the Pleistocene epoch. It features new fossil and molecular evidence, such as the evolutionary inferences drawn from assessments of modern humans and large segments of the Neandertal genome. It also addresses the impact of digital imagery and the more sophisticated morphometrics that have entered the analytical fray since 1984. Beginning with a thoughtful introduction by the authors on modern human origins, the book offers such insightful chapter contributions as: Africa: The Cradle of Modern People Crossroads of the Old World: Late Hominin Evolution in Western Asia A River Runs through It: Modern Human Origins in East Asia Perspectives on the Origins of Modern Australians Modern Human Origins in Central Europe The Makers of the Early Upper Paleolithic in Western Eurasia Neandertal Craniofacial Growth and Development and Its Relevance for Modern Human Origins Energetics and the Origin of Modern Humans Understanding Human Cranial Variation in Light of Modern Human Origins The Relevance of Archaic Genomes to Modern Human Origins The Process of Modern Human Origins: The Evolutionary and Demographic Changes Giving Rise to Modern Humans The Paleobiology of Modern Human Emergence Elegant and thought provoking, The Origins of Modern Humans: Biology Reconsidered is an ideal read for students, grad students, and professionals in human evolution and paleoanthropology.
Download or read book Modern Humans written by John F. Hoffecker and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Humans is a vivid account of the most recent—and perhaps the most important—phase of human evolution: the appearance of anatomically modern people (Homo sapiens) in Africa less than half a million years ago and their later spread throughout the world. Leaving no stone unturned, John F. Hoffecker demonstrates that Homo sapiens represents a “major transition” in the evolution of living systems in terms of fundamental changes in the role of non-genetic information. Modern Humans synthesizes recent findings from genetics (including the rapidly growing body of ancient DNA), the human fossil record, and archaeology relating to the African origin and global dispersal of anatomically modern people. Hoffecker places humans in the broad context of the evolution of life, emphasizing the critical role of genetic and non-genetic forms of information in living systems as well as how changes in the storage, transmission, and translation of information underlie major transitions in evolution. He also draws on information and complexity theory to explain the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa several hundred thousand years ago and the rapid and unprecedented spread of our species into a variety of environments in Australia and Eurasia, including the Arctic and Beringia, beginning between 75,000 and 60,000 years ago. This magisterial work will appeal to all with an interest in the ever-fascinating field of human evolution.
Download or read book The Emergence of Modern Humans written by Paul Mellars and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book African Genesis written by Sally C. Reynolds and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reviews key themes and developments in palaeoanthropology, exploring their impact on our understanding of human origins in Africa.
Download or read book Handbook of Paleoanthropology written by Winfried Henke and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-05-10 with total page 2057 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 3-volume handbook brings together contributions by the world ́s leading specialists that reflect the broad spectrum of modern palaeoanthropology, thus presenting an indispensable resource for professionals and students alike. Vol. 1 reviews principles, methods, and approaches, recounting recent advances and state-of-the-art knowledge in phylogenetic analysis, palaeoecology and evolutionary theory and philosophy. Vol. 2 examines primate origins, evolution, behaviour, and adaptive variety, emphasizing integration of fossil data with contemporary knowledge of the behaviour and ecology of living primates in natural environments. Vol. 3 deals with fossil and molecular evidence for the evolution of Homo sapiens and its fossil relatives.
Download or read book Origins of Anatomically Modern Humans written by Doris V. Nitecki and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is based on the Field Museum of Natural History Spring System atics Symposium held in Chicago on May 11, 1991. The financial support of Ray and Jean Auel and of the Field Museum is gratefully acknowledged. When we teach or write, we present only those elements that support our arguments. We avoid all weak points of our debate and all the uncer tainties of our models. Thus, we offer hypotheses as facts. Multiauthored books like ours, which simultaneously advocate and question diverse views, avoid the pitfalls and lessen the impact of indoctrination. In this volume we analyze the anthropological and biological disagreements and the positions taken on the origins of modern humans, point out difficultieswith the inter pretations, and suggest that the concept of the human origin can be explained only when we first attempt to define Homo sapiens sapiens. One of the major controversies in physical anthropology concerns the geographic origin of anatomically modern humans. It is undisputed, due to the extensive research of the Leakeys and their colleagues, that the family Hominidae originated in Africa, but the geographic origin of Homo sapiens sapiens is less concretely accepted. Two schools of thought existon this topic.
Download or read book Emergence and Diversity of Modern Human Behavior in Paleolithic Asia written by Yousuke Kaifu and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-15 with total page 1019 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the obvious geographic importance of eastern Asia in human migration, its discussion in the context of the emergence and dispersal of modern humans has been rare. Emergence and Diversity of Modern Human Behavior in Paleolithic Asia focuses long-overdue scholarly attention on this under-studied area of the world. Arising from a 2011 symposium sponsored by the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo, this book gathers the work of archaeologists from the Pacific Rim of Asia, Australia, and North America, to address the relative lack of attention given to the emergence of modern human behavior as manifested in Asia during the worldwide dispersal from Africa.
Download or read book The Rise of Homo Sapiens written by Frederick L. Coolidge and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-04-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rise of Homo Sapiens: The Evolution of Human Thinking presents a provocative theory about the evolution of the modern mind based on archaeological evidence and the working memory model of experimental psychologist Alan Baddeley. The book explains the mystery of the disappearance of the Neandertals and the ascendancy of modern Homo sapiens - and whether this was at the expense of the Neandertals. The Rise of Homo Sapiens has been written to introduce scientists and students to the fascinating interface between the worlds of archaeology and cognitive science, and argues that the evolution of modern thinking occurred in two major leaps; the advent of Homo erectus over 1.5 million years ago, and a final enhancement of working memory capacity sometime within the last 200,000 years. The authors argue that highly ritualized burials, personal ornaments, cave art and highly creative figurines, and age and gender divisions of economic labor, all of which were characteristic of Homo sapiens about 30,000 years ago, were clearly products of their cognitive functions, e.g., central executive functions. Neandertals, living at the same time, had virtually none of these cultural products despite larger brains! This is the first book to explain elaborately how thinking differences between Homo sapiens and Neandertals may have accounted for the ultimate demise of Neandertals. Cognitive archaeology is a quickly growing discipline yet archaeologists have been slow to adopt current theories, models, and findings within contemporary cognitive science. The Rise of Homo Sapiens will serve as a unique introduction and primer into both disciplines.
Download or read book Cro Magnon written by Brian Fagan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-05-17 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cro-Magnons were the first fully modern Europeans--not only the creators of the stunning cave paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere, but the most adaptable and technologically inventive people that had yet lived on earth. The prolonged encounter between theCro-Magnons and the archaic Neanderthals, between 45,000 and 30,000 years ago, was one of the defining moments of history. The Neanderthals survived for some 15,000 years in the face of the newcomers, but were finally pushed aside by the Cro-Magnons' vastly superior intellectual abilities and cutting-edge technologies. What do we know about this remarkable takeover? Who were these first modern Europeans and what were they like? How did they manage to thrive in such an extreme environment? And what legacydid they leave behind them after the cold millennia? This is the story of a little known, yet seminal, chapter of human experience.--From publisher description.
Download or read book The Evolution of Modern Humans in Africa written by Pamela R. Willoughby and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2007 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating, detailed study of the origins of modern humans. Includes material from Willoughby's own research in Tanzania.
Download or read book Modern Humans written by Rebecca Stefoff and published by Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2010-01-15 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Describes the rise of modern humans, Homo sapiens, including the theories about our origins and how we spread throughout the world, with information based on the latest fossil and DNA studies"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Neanderthals and Modern Humans written by Clive Finlayson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-11 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neanderthals and Modern Humans develops the theme of the close relationship between climate change, ecological change and biogeographical patterns in humans during the Pleistocene. In particular, it challenges the view that Modern Human 'superiority' caused the extinction of the Neanderthals between 40 and 30 thousand years ago. Clive Finlayson shows that to understand human evolution, the spread of humankind across the world and the extinction of archaic populations, we must move away from a purely theoretical evolutionary ecology base and realise the importance of wider biogeographic patterns including the role of tropical and temperate refugia. His proposal is that Neanderthals became extinct because their world changed faster than they could cope with, and that their relationship with the arriving Modern Humans, where they met, was subtle.
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 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading researcher on human evolution proposes a new and controversial theory of how our species came to be 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. 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.
Download or read book The Early Modern Human from Tianyuan Cave China written by Hong Shang and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-18 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century, scientists have returned time and again to the issue of modern human emergence-the when and where of the evolutionary process and the human behavioral and biological dynamics involved. The 2003 discovery of a human partial skeleton at Tianyuandong (Tianyuan Cave) excited worldwide interest. The first human skeleton from the region to be directly radiocarbon-dated (to 40,000 years before present), its geological age places it close to the time period during which modern humans became permanently established across the Old World (between 50,000 and 35,000 years ago). Through detailed description and interpretation of the most complete early modern human skeleton from eastern Asia, The Early Modern Human from Tianyan Cave, China, addresses long-term questions about the ancestry of modern humans in eastern Asia and the nature of the changes in human behavior with the emergence of modern human biology. This book is a detailed, paleontological and paleobiological presentation of this skeleton, its context, and its implications. By providing basic information for this important human fossil, offering inferences concerning the population processes involved in modern human emergence in eastern Eurasia, and by raising questions concerning the adaptations of these early modern human hunter-gatherers, The Early Modern Human from Tianyuan Cave, China will take its place as a core contribution to the study of modern human emergence.
Download or read book Early Humans and Their World written by Bo Gräslund and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-10-11 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summarizing modern research on early hominid evolution from the apes six million years ago to the emergence of modern humans, this book is the first to present a synthetic discussion of many aspects of early human life.
Download or read book Understanding Climate s Influence on Human Evolution written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2010-04-17 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hominin fossil record documents a history of critical evolutionary events that have ultimately shaped and defined what it means to be human, including the origins of bipedalism; the emergence of our genus Homo; the first use of stone tools; increases in brain size; and the emergence of Homo sapiens, tools, and culture. The Earth's geological record suggests that some evolutionary events were coincident with substantial changes in African and Eurasian climate, raising the possibility that critical junctures in human evolution and behavioral development may have been affected by the environmental characteristics of the areas where hominins evolved. Understanding Climate's Change on Human Evolution explores the opportunities of using scientific research to improve our understanding of how climate may have helped shape our species. Improved climate records for specific regions will be required before it is possible to evaluate how critical resources for hominins, especially water and vegetation, would have been distributed on the landscape during key intervals of hominin history. Existing records contain substantial temporal gaps. The book's initiatives are presented in two major research themes: first, determining the impacts of climate change and climate variability on human evolution and dispersal; and second, integrating climate modeling, environmental records, and biotic responses. Understanding Climate's Change on Human Evolution suggests a new scientific program for international climate and human evolution studies that involve an exploration initiative to locate new fossil sites and to broaden the geographic and temporal sampling of the fossil and archeological record; a comprehensive and integrative scientific drilling program in lakes, lake bed outcrops, and ocean basins surrounding the regions where hominins evolved and a major investment in climate modeling experiments for key time intervals and regions that are critical to understanding human evolution.
Download or read book Human Evolution A Very Short Introduction written by Bernard Wood and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of human evolution is advancing rapidly. Newly discovered fossil evidence is adding ever more pieces to the puzzle of our past, whilst revolutionary technological advances in the study of ancient DNA are completely reshaping theories of early human populations and migrations. In this Very Short Introduction Bernard Wood traces the history of paleoanthropology from its beginnings in the eighteenth century to the very latest fossil finds. In this new edition he discusses how Ancient DNA studies have revolutionized how we view the recent (post-550 ka) human evolution, and the process of speciation. The combination of ancient and modern human DNA has contributed to discoveries of new taxa, as well as the suggestion of 'ghost' taxa whose fossil records still remain to be discovered. Considering the contributions of related sciences such as paleoclimatology, geochronology, systematics, genetics, and developmental biology, Wood explores our latest understandings of our own evolution. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
