Download or read book The Mammals That Moved Mankind written by R.C. Sturgis and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We drive off in our cars, catch trains, and fly to the other side of the world. But how did we and why did we first became mobile? This is a history of the extraordinary range of animals that helped drag Mankind out of pre-history and into his now extremely mobile present. We depended on just six animals to help us hunt, to carry us and drag our loads. Without dogs, horses, oxen, camels, elephants and reindeer, civilization would have taken a very much longer time arriving. But they provided much more than just transport and affected our lives in so many ways from milk to magic, from meat to trading and from games to war.
Download or read book The Mammals That Moved Mankind written by R. C. Sturgis and published by . This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Dominant Animal written by Paul R. Ehrlich and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In humanity’s more than 100,000 year history, we have evolved from vulnerable creatures clawing sustenance from Earth to a sophisticated global society manipulating every inch of it. In short, we have become the dominant animal. Why, then, are we creating a world that threatens our own species? What can we do to change the current trajectory toward more climate change, increased famine, and epidemic disease? Renowned Stanford scientists Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich believe that intelligently addressing those questions depends on a clear understanding of how we evolved and how and why we’re changing the planet in ways that darken our descendants’ future. The Dominant Animal arms readers with that knowledge, tracing the interplay between environmental change and genetic and cultural evolution since the dawn of humanity. In lucid and engaging prose, they describe how Homo sapiens adapted to their surroundings, eventually developing the vibrant cultures, vast scientific knowledge, and technological wizardry we know today. But the Ehrlichs also explore the flip side of this triumphant story of innovation and conquest. As we clear forests to raise crops and build cities, lace the continents with highways, and create chemicals never before seen in nature, we may be undermining our own supremacy. The threats of environmental damage are clear from the daily headlines, but the outcome is far from destined. Humanity can again adapt—if we learn from our evolutionary past. Those lessons are crystallized in The Dominant Animal. Tackling the fundamental challenge of the human predicament, Paul and Anne Ehrlich offer a vivid and unique exploration of our origins, our evolution, and our future.
Download or read book After Man written by Dougal Dixen and published by . This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1981 St Martin's Press published After Man, the first edition of palaeontologist Dougal Dixon's vision of an 'alternative evolution': one without mankind. To some, this was seen as sacrilege, but Dixon himself only ever saw the decision to obliterate his own species from his vision as a practical one.
Download or read book Twilight of the Mammoths written by Paul S. Martin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-05-08 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Paul S. Martin's innovative ideas on late quaternary extinctions and wildlife restoration have fueled one of science's most stimulating recent debates. He expounds them vividly here, and defends them eloquently. A must-read."—David Rains Wallace, author of Beasts of Eden "This is a marvelous read, by a giant in American prehistory, about one of the greatest mysteries in the earth sciences."—Tim Flannery, author of The Eternal Frontier "Whether or not you agree with Paul Martin, he has shaped how we think about our Pleistocene ancestors and their role in transforming this planet."—Ross D. E. MacPhee, Curator of Mammalogy, American Museum of Natural History
Download or read book First Steps written by Jeremy DeSilva and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the W.W. Howells Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association and named one of the best science books of 2021 by Science News “DeSilva takes us on a brilliant, fun, and scientifically deep stroll through history, anatomy, and evolution, in order to illustrate the powerful story of how a particular mode of movement helped make us one of the most wonderful, dangerous and fascinating species on Earth.”—Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University and author of Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being “Breezy popular science at its best. . . . Makes a compelling case overall.”—Science News Blending history, science, and culture, a stunning and highly engaging evolutionary story exploring how walking on two legs allowed humans to become the planet’s dominant species. Humans are the only mammals to walk on two, rather than four legs—a locomotion known as bipedalism. We strive to be upstanding citizens, honor those who stand tall and proud, and take a stand against injustices. We follow in each other’s footsteps and celebrate a child’s beginning to walk. But why, and how, exactly, did we take our first steps? And at what cost? Bipedalism has its drawbacks: giving birth is more difficult and dangerous; our running speed is much slower than other animals; and we suffer a variety of ailments, from hernias to sinus problems. In First Steps, paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva explores how unusual and extraordinary this seemingly ordinary ability is. A seven-million-year journey to the very origins of the human lineage, First Steps shows how upright walking was a gateway to many of the other attributes that make us human—from our technological abilities, our thirst for exploration, our use of language–and may have laid the foundation for our species’ traits of compassion, empathy, and altruism. Moving from developmental psychology labs to ancient fossil sites throughout Africa and Eurasia, DeSilva brings to life our adventure walking on two legs. Delving deeply into the story of our past and the new discoveries rewriting our understanding of human evolution, First Steps examines how walking upright helped us rise above all over species on this planet. First Steps includes an eight-page color photo insert.
Download or read book How Animals Grieve written by Barbara J. King and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A touching and provocative exploration of the latest research on animal minds and animal emotions” from the renowned anthropologist and author (The Washington Post). Scientists have long cautioned against anthropomorphizing animals, arguing that it limits our ability to truly comprehend the lives of other creatures. Recently, however, things have begun to shift in the other direction, and anthropologist Barbara J. King is at the forefront of that movement, arguing strenuously that we can—and should—attend to animal emotions. With How Animals Grieve, she draws our attention to the specific case of grief, and relates story after story—from fieldsites, farms, homes, and more—of animals mourning lost companions, mates, or friends. King tells of elephants surrounding their matriarch as she weakens and dies, and, in the following days, attending to her corpse as if holding a vigil. A housecat loses her sister, from whom she’s never before been parted, and spends weeks pacing the apartment, wailing plaintively. A baboon loses her daughter to a predator and sinks into grief. In each case, King uses her anthropological training to interpret and try to explain what we see—to help us understand this animal grief properly, as something neither the same as nor wholly different from the human experience of loss. The resulting book is both daring and down-to-earth, strikingly ambitious even as it’s careful to acknowledge the limits of our understanding. Through the moving stories she chronicles and analyzes so beautifully, King brings us closer to the animals with whom we share a planet, and helps us see our own experiences, attachments, and emotions as part of a larger web of life, death, love, and loss.
Download or read book Personalities on the Plate written by Barbara J. King and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rooted in the latest science, and built on a mix of firsthand experience (including entomophagy, which, yes, is what you think it is) and close engagement with the work of scientists, farmers, vets, and chefs, Personalities on the Plate is an unforgettable journey through the world of animals we eat."--Dust jacket.
Download or read book Survival of the Friendliest written by Brian Hare and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful new theory of human nature suggests that our secret to success as a species is our unique friendliness “Brilliant, eye-opening, and absolutely inspiring—and a riveting read. Hare and Woods have written the perfect book for our time.”—Cass R. Sunstein, author of How Change Happens and co-author of Nudge For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened? Since Charles Darwin wrote about “evolutionary fitness,” the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history. Advancing what they call the “self-domestication theory,” Brian Hare, professor in the department of evolutionary anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University and his wife, Vanessa Woods, a research scientist and award-winning journalist, shed light on the mysterious leap in human cognition that allowed Homo sapiens to thrive. But this gift for friendliness came at a cost. Just as a mother bear is most dangerous around her cubs, we are at our most dangerous when someone we love is threatened by an “outsider.” The threatening outsider is demoted to sub-human, fair game for our worst instincts. Hare’s groundbreaking research, developed in close coordination with Richard Wrangham and Michael Tomasello, giants in the field of cognitive evolution, reveals that the same traits that make us the most tolerant species on the planet also make us the cruelest. Survival of the Friendliest offers us a new way to look at our cultural as well as cognitive evolution and sends a clear message: In order to survive and even to flourish, we need to expand our definition of who belongs.
Download or read book Seeing Like a City written by Ash Amin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-01-09 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeing like a city means recognizing that cities are living things made up of a tangle of networks, built up from the agency of countless actors. Cities must not be considered as expressions of larger paradigms or sites of human effort and organization alone. Within their density, size and sprawl can be found a world of symbols, bodies, buildings, technologies and infrastructures. It is the machine-like combination, interaction and confrontation of these different elements that make a city. Such a view locates urban outcomes and influences in the character of these networks, which together power urban life, allocating resources, shaping social opportunities, maintaining order and simply enabling life. More than the silent stage on which other powers perform, such networks represent the essence of the city. They also form an important political project, a politics of small interventions with large effects. The increasing evidence for an Anthropocene bears out the way in which humanity has stamped its footprint on the planet by constructing urban forms that act as systems for directing life in ways that create both immense power and immense constraint.
Download or read book Animal Life and the Moving Image written by Michael Lawrence and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the proto-cinematic sequencing of animal motion in the nineteenth century to the ubiquity of animal videos online, the histories of animal life and the moving image are enigmatically interlocked. Animal Life and the Moving Image is the first collection of essays to offer a sustained focus on the relations between screen cultures and non-human animals. The volume brings together some of the most important and influential writers working on the non-human animal's significance for cultures and theories of the moving image. It offers innovative analyses of the representation of animals across a wide range of documentary, fiction, mainstream and avant-garde practices, from early cinema to contemporary user-generated media. Individual chapters consider King Kong, The Birds, The Misfits, The Cove, Grizzly Man and Microcosmos, the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Bresson, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Greenaway, Carolee Schneemann and Isabella Rossellini, and YouTube stars Christian the lion and Maru the cat.
Download or read book The Outline of History Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind written by H. G. Wells and published by anboco. This book was released on 2016-08-26 with total page 868 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged with the conviction that all existence is one—a single conception sustained from beginning to end upon one identical law."—Friedrich Ratzel.
Download or read book Good Natured written by Frans B. M. de Waal and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997-10-15 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To observe a dog's guilty look. to witness a gorilla's self-sacrifice for a wounded mate, to watch an elephant herd's communal effort on behalf of a stranded calf--to catch animals in certain acts is to wonder what moves them. Might there he a code of ethics in the animal kingdom? Must an animal be human to he humane? In this provocative book, a renowned scientist takes on those who have declared ethics uniquely human Making a compelling case for a morality grounded in biology, he shows how ethical behavior is as much a matter of evolution as any other trait, in humans and animals alike. World famous for his brilliant descriptions of Machiavellian power plays among chimpanzees-the nastier side of animal life--Frans de Waal here contends that animals have a nice side as well. Making his case through vivid anecdotes drawn from his work with apes and monkeys and holstered by the intriguing, voluminous data from his and others' ongoing research, de Waal shows us that many of the building blocks of morality are natural: they can he observed in other animals. Through his eyes, we see how not just primates but all kinds of animals, from marine mammals to dogs, respond to social rules, help each other, share food, resolve conflict to mutual satisfaction, even develop a crude sense of justice and fairness. Natural selection may be harsh, but it has produced highly successful species that survive through cooperation and mutual assistance. De Waal identifies this paradox as the key to an evolutionary account of morality, and demonstrates that human morality could never have developed without the foundation of fellow feeling our species shares with other animals. As his work makes clear, a morality grounded in biology leads to an entirely different conception of what it means to he human--and humane.
Download or read book The Unstoppable Human Species written by John J. Shea and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-23 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Unstoppable Species John Shea explains how the earliest humans achieved mastery over all but the most severe, biosphere-level, extinction threats. He explores how and why we humans owe our survival skills to our global geographic range, a diaspora that was achieved during prehistoric times. By developing and integrating a suite of Ancestral Survival Skills, humans overcame survival challenges better than other hominins, and settled in previously unoccupied habitats. But how did they do it? How did early humans endure long enough to become our ancestors? Shea places 'how did they survive?' questions front and center in prehistory. Using an explicitly scientific, comparative, and hypothesis-testing approach, The Unstoppable Human Species critically examines much 'archaeological mythology' about prehistoric humans. Written in clear and engaging language, Shea's volume offers an original and thought-provoking perspective on human evolution. Moving beyond unproductive archaeological debates about prehistoric population movements, The Unstoppable Human Species generates new and interesting questions about human evolution.
Download or read book The Accidental Species written by Henry Gee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With a delightfully irascible sense of humor, Henry Gee reflects on our origin . . . an excellent primer on how—and how not—to think about human evolution.” —Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being “animal” and started being “human.” In The Accidental Species, Henry Gee, longtime paleontology editor at Nature, takes aim at this misleading notion, arguing that it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how evolution works and, when applied to the evolution of our own species, supports mistaken ideas about our own place in the universe. Gee presents a robust and stark challenge to our tendency to see ourselves as the acme of creation. Far from being a quirk of religious fundamentalism, human exceptionalism, Gee argues, is an error that also infects scientific thought. Touring the many features of human beings that have recurrently been used to distinguish us from the rest of the animal world, Gee shows that our evolutionary outcome is one possibility among many, one that owes more to chance than to an organized progression to supremacy. He starts with bipedality, which he shows could have arisen entirely by accident, as a by-product of sexual selection, then moves on to technology, large brain size, intelligence, language, and, finally, sentience. He reveals each of these attributes to be alive and well throughout the animal world—they are not, indeed, unique to our species. The Accidental Species combines Gee’s expertise and experience with healthy skepticism and humor to create a book that aims to overturn popular thinking on human evolution. The key is not what’s missing—but how we’re linked.
Download or read book Close Encounters with Humankind A Paleoanthropologist Investigates Our Evolving Species written by Sang-Hee Lee and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Deftly weaving together science and personal observation, Lee proves an engaging, authoritative guide… of the human condition.” —Kate Wong, editor at Scientific American What can fossilized teeth tell us about our ancient ancestors’ life expectancy? Did farming play a problematic role in the history of human evolution? And what do we have in common with Neanderthals? In this captivating bestseller, Close Encounters with Humankind, paleoanthropologist Sang-Hee Lee explores our greatest evolutionary questions from new and unexpected angles. Through a series of entertaining, bite-sized chapters that combine anthropological insight with cutting-edge science, we gain fresh perspectives into our first hominin ancestors and ways to challenge perceptions about the traditional progression of evolution. With Lee as our guide, we discover that we indeed have always been a species of continuous change.
Download or read book Evidence as to Man s Place in Nature written by Thomas Henry Huxley and published by . This book was released on 1863 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
