Download or read book The Improbable Primate written by Clive Finlayson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014-03 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Improbable Primate, Clive Finlayson gives a provocative view of human evolution, arguing that the critical factor that shaped us was water. Questioning current accounts of tools and our spread from Africa, he presents an ecological viewpoint.
Download or read book The Monkey s Voyage written by Alan de Queiroz and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the world, closely related species are found on landmasses separated by wide stretches of ocean. What explains these far-flung distributions? Why are such species found where they are across the Earth? Since the discovery of plate tectonics, scientists have conjectured that plants and animals were scattered over the globe by riding pieces of ancient supercontinents as they broke up. In the past decade, however, that theory has foundered, as the genomic revolution has made reams of new data available. And the data has revealed an extraordinary, stranger-than-fiction story that has sparked a scientific upheaval. In The Monkey's Voyage, biologist Alan de Queiroz describes the radical new view of how fragmented distributions came into being: frogs and mammals rode on rafts and icebergs, tiny spiders drifted on storm winds, and plant seeds were carried in the plumage of sea-going birds to create the map of life we see today. In other words, these organisms were not simply constrained by continental fate; they were the makers of their own geographic destiny. And as de Queiroz shows, the effects of oceanic dispersal have been crucial in generating the diversity of life on Earth, from monkeys and guinea pigs in South America to beech trees and kiwi birds in New Zealand. By toppling the idea that the slow process of continental drift is the main force behind the odd distributions of organisms, this theory highlights the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the history of life. In the tradition of John McPhee's Basin and Range, The Monkey's Voyage is a beautifully told narrative that strikingly reveals the importance of contingency in history and the nature of scientific discovery.
Download or read book Northwest Anthropological Research Notes written by Roderick Sprague and published by Northwest Anthropology. This book was released on with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diet 123: A Computerized Dietary Analysis Program Using Lotus 123TM - Nicolette I. Teufel and George J. Teufel The Cultural Ecology of Hunting and Potlatches Among the Lillooet Indians - Steven Romanoff Abstracts of Papers, 40th Annual Northwest Anthropological Conference Jargonization Before Chinook Jargon - William J. Samarin Improbable Species, Deceit, and Social Control in the Context of Behavioral Ecology - Richard Beeson Protecting American Indian Sacred Geography - Deward E. Walker, Jr.
Download or read book Guess the Primate written by Kari Noel and published by Gray Duck Creative Works. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten mystery primates put themselves out there in this book. They show their most flattering and unflattering features. For example, one points out its pretty red hair while another one calls attention to its big nose. Each primate hopes to be known by young readers.
Download or read book The Cradle of Humanity written by Mark Maslin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the fundamental questions of our existence is why we are so smart. There are lots of drawbacks to having a large brain, including the huge food intake needed to keep the organ running, the frequency with which it goes wrong, and our very high infant and mother mortality rates compared with other mammals, due to the difficulty of giving birth to offspring with very large heads. So why did evolution favour the brainy ape? This question has been widely debated among biological anthropologists, and in recent years, Maslin and his colleagues have pioneered a new theory that might just be the answer. Looking back to a crucial period some 1.9 million years ago, when brain capacity increased by as much as 80%, The Cradle of Humanity explores the implications of two adaptive responses by our hominin ancestors to rapid climatic changes - big jaws, and big brains. Maslin argues that the impact of changing landscapes and fluctuating climates that led to the appearance of intermittent freshwater lakes in East Africa may have played a key role in human evolution. Alongside the physical evidence of fossils and tools, he considers social theories of why a large, complex brain would have provided a major advantage when trying to survive in the constantly changing East African landscape.
Download or read book An Ape s View of Human Evolution written by Peter Andrews and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-07 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our closest living relatives are the chimpanzee and bonobo. We share many characteristics with them, but our lineages diverged millions of years ago. Who in fact was our last common ancestor? Bringing together ecology, evolution, genetics, anatomy and geology, this book provides a new perspective on human evolution. What can fossil apes tell us about the origins of human evolution? Did the last common ancestor of apes and humans live in trees or on the ground? What did it eat, and how did it survive in a world full of large predators? Did it look anything like living apes? Andrews addresses these questions and more to reconstruct the common ancestor and its habitat. Synthesising thirty-five years of work on both ancient environments and fossil and modern ape anatomy, this book provides unique new insights into the evolutionary processes that led to the origins of the human lineage.
Download or read book The Coming Storm written by Liam Fox and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following Russia's aggressive war in Ukraine, the world is suddenly gripped by concerns over energy security. And yet, there is an even greater threat ahead – one that is much more likely to shape the events of the twenty-first century than the competition for oil or gas. The combination of an ever-increasing global population, climate change, industrialisation, urbanisation and limited natural resources means that one difficulty, above all, will shape the political, economic and security environment in the years ahead: that is water. If people and nations will fight for fossil fuels, it is nothing compared to what they will do for the most vital natural resource of all. As both a citizen who has supported water charities and worked in the NHS and a politician who has dealt with security and economic issues, Liam Fox tells the story of water and the problems it presents in a more complete way than ever before. The Coming Storm unites a range of concerns that are often written about separately but seldom together and provides a comprehensible and compelling call for urgent action.
Download or read book Duetting and Turn Taking Patterns of Singing Mammals From Genes to Vocal Plasticity and Beyond written by Patrice Adret and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-10-23 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mammalian vocal duets and turn-taking exchanges — long, coordinated acoustic signals exchanged between two individuals— are primarily found in family-living, pair-bonded mammals with a socially monogamous lifestyle (some rodents, some lemurs, tarsiers, titi monkeys, a Mentawai langur, gibbons and siamangs). Duetting and turn-taking patterns combine visual, chemical, tactile and auditory cues to produce some of the most exuberant displays in the realm of animal communication. How and why such phenotypes evolved independently across main lineages are fundamental questions at the core of the nature-nurture debate. Duetting styles ranging from antiphonal (non-overlapping) to simultaneous (overlapping) emissions have now been documented in various taxa, some of which are quite reminiscent of turn-taking rules in human conversation. Nonetheless, much remains to be learned about this complex motor skill, and at all four levels of analysis, namely (1) developmental processes, (2) causal mechanisms (3) functional properties and (4) evolutionary history. Given the strong link between this form of coordinated singing and pair-bonding, gaining a deeper understanding of this kind of cooperative behavior will likely shed more light on the deep evolutionary roots of human culture, language and music.
Download or read book Human Fatigue written by Francesco E. Marino and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fatigue is a condition spanning the breadth of human functioning in health and disease and is a central concern in sport and exercise. Even so we are yet to fully understand its causes. One reason for this lack of understanding is that we seldom consider fatigue from an evolutionary perspective - as an adaptation that provided reproductive success. This ground-breaking book outlines the evidence that fatigue is a result of adaptations distinctive to humans. It argues that humans developed adaptations which led to enhanced fatigue resistance compared with other mammals and discusses the implications in the context of exercise, health and performance. Highly illustrated throughout, it covers topics such as defining and measuring fatigue, the emotional aspect of fatigue, how thermoregulation affects the human capacity to resist fatigue, and fatigue in disease. Human Fatigue is essential reading for all exercise scientists as well as graduate and undergraduate students in the broad field of physiology and exercise physiology.
Download or read book The Five Million Year Odyssey written by Peter Bellwood and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Human beings are incredibly diverse, from appearance and language to culture. How do we understand this diversity as a product of evolution and migration over millions of years? In this book, Peter Bellwood brings together biology, archaeology, linguistics, and anthropology to provide a sweeping look at human evolution from 5 million years ago to the rise of agriculture and civilization, presenting modern human diversity as a product of the shared history of human populations around the world. Bellwood opens the book by explaining what allows us to understand and reconstruct the human past, including the importance of archaeological, biological, and cultural approaches as well as an understanding of climate and chronology on vast time scales. From there he proceeds forward in time from the split with chimpanzees c. 6 million years ago, the emergence of Homo 2.5 million years ago, and the appearance of modern humans c. 300,000 years ago. Each chapter is driven by a set of major questions that we have new answers to, such as when did human first leave Africa?, was Homo a new species?, what was the path of migration for early humans and did early humans have discernible social life and material culture? Moving forward in time, Bellwood describes cultural and then linguistic evolution over the last 20,000 years, again driving each chapter with big questions. He concludes the book by asking how much human behavior has changed based on what we know about the past and whether humans are still evolving genetically and culturally. Ultimately, this book shows that to understand human history and ongoing modern human diversity we must first understand human populations as a the result of millions of years of shared genetic and cultural evolution"--
Download or read book Rousseau s Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy written by Nelson Lund and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-17 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reads Jean-Jacques Rousseau with a view toward deepening our understanding of many political issues alive today, including the place of women in society, the viability of traditional family structures, the role of religion and religious freedom in nations that are becoming ever more secular, and the proper conduct of American constitutional government. Rousseau has been among the most influential modern philosophers, and among the most misunderstood. The first great philosophic critic of the Enlightenment, he sought to revive political philosophy as it was practiced by Plato, and to make it useful in the modern world. His understanding of politics rests on deep and often prescient reflections about the nature of the human soul and the relationship between our animal origins and the achievements of civilization. This book demonstrates that the implications Rousseau drew from those reflections continue to deserve serious attention.
Download or read book Social DNA written by M. Kay Martin and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What set our ancestors off on a separate evolutionary trajectory was the ability to flex their reproductive and social strategies in response to changing environmental conditions. Exploring new cross-disciplinary research that links this capacity to critical changes in the organization of the primate brain, Social DNA presents a new synthesis of ideas on human social origins – challenging models that trace our beginnings to traits shaped by ancient hunting economies, or to genetic platforms shared with contemporary apes.
Download or read book The Smart Neanderthal written by Clive Finlayson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late 1980s the dominant theory of human origins has been that a 'cognitive revolution' (C.50,000 years ago) led to the advent of our species, Homo sapiens. As a result of this revolution our species spread and eventually replaced all existing archaic Homo species, ultimately leading to the superiority of modern humans. Or so we thought. As Clive Finlayson explains, the latest advances in genetics prove that there was significant interbreeding between Modern Humans and the Neanderthals. All non-Africans today carry some Neanderthal genes. We have also discovered aspects of Neanderthal behaviour that indicate that they were not cognitively inferior to modern humans, as we once thought, and in fact had their own rituals and art. Finlayson, who is at the forefront of this research, recounts the discoveries of his team, providing evidence that Neanderthals caught birds of prey, and used their feathers for symbolic purposes. There is also evidence that Neanderthals practised other forms of art, as the recently discovered engravings in Gorham's Cave Gibraltar indicate. Linking all the recent evidence, The Smart Neanderthal casts a new light on the Neanderthals and the 'Cognitive Revolution'. Finlayson argues that there was no revolution and, instead, modern behaviour arose gradually and independently among different populations of Modern Humans and Neanderthals. Some practices were even adopted by Modern Humans from the Neanderthals. Finlayson overturns classic narratives of human origins, and raises important questions about who we really are.
Download or read book Climate Clothing and Agriculture in Prehistory written by Ian Gilligan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clothing was crucial in human evolution, and having to cope with climate change was as true in prehistory as it is today. In Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory, Ian Gilligan offers the first complete account of the development of clothing as a response to cold exposure during the ice ages. He explores how and when clothes were invented, noting that the thermal motive alone is tenable in view of the naked condition of humans. His account shows that there is considerably more archaeological evidence for palaeolithic clothes than is generally appreciated. Moreover, Gilligan posits, clothing played a leading role in major technological innovations. He demonstrates that fibre production and the advent of woven fabrics, developed in response to global warming, were pivotal to the origins of agriculture. Drawing together evidence from many disciplines, Climate Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory is written in a clear and engaging style, and is illustrated with nearly 100 images.
Download or read book The Human Condition written by Stefan Wurm and published by ATICE LLC. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a very short period, only a few hundred years, our understanding of the cosmos, our planet Earth, the evolution of life on it, and the beginnings of our very own human endeavor have radically changed. These revolutions in science and technology have dramatically altered our societies in many ways. For quite some time it seemed as if our planets resources were unlimited. Today we know that this is not the case. Human civilizations are shaping our planets future in ways that have profound consequences for all other life on Earth as well as for us. We need to reflect broadly on what defines our human condition if we wish our societies to be successful in navigating a future that cannot be just ours but must include the broad diversity of life on Earth without which humankind will not survive. This book tells the story of how we discovered the universe, how we learned about our planet and the life evolving on it, how humanity emerged from pre-history, and what some of the future of our civilizations could hold.
Download or read book Human Origins written by Camilla Power and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human Origins brings together new thinking by social anthropologists and other scholars on the evolution of human culture and society. No other discipline has more relevant expertise to consider the emergence of humans as the symbolic species. Yet, social anthropologists have been conspicuously absent from debates about the origins of modern humans. These contributions explore why that is, and how social anthropology can shed light on early kinship and economic relations, gender politics, ritual, cosmology, ethnobiology, medicine, and the evolution of language.
Download or read book Tropical Forests in Prehistory History and Modernity written by Patrick Roberts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In popular discourse, tropical forests are synonymous with 'nature' and 'wilderness'; battlegrounds between apparently pristine floral, faunal, and human communities, and the unrelenting industrial and urban powers of the modern world. It is rarely publicly understood that the extent of human adaptation to, and alteration of, tropical forest environments extends across archaeological, historical, and anthropological timescales. This book is the first attempt to bring together evidence for the nature of human interactions with tropical forests on a global scale, from the emergence of hominins in the tropical forests of Africa to modern conservation issues. Following a review of the natural history and variability of tropical forest ecosystems, this book takes a tour of human, and human ancestor, occupation and use of tropical forest environments through time. Far from being pristine, primordial ecosystems, this book illustrates how our species has inhabited and modified tropical forests from the earliest stages of its evolution. While agricultural strategies and vast urban networks emerged in tropical forests long prior to the arrival of European colonial powers and later industrialization, this should not be taken as justification for the massive deforestation and biodiversity threats imposed on tropical forest ecosystems in the 21st century. Rather, such a long-term perspective highlights the ongoing challenges of sustainability faced by forager, agricultural, and urban societies in these environments, setting the stage for more integrated approaches to conservation and policy-making, and the protection of millennia of ecological and cultural heritage bound up in these habitats.
