num_pages: 544
description: A behind-the-scenes account of the discovery of the oldest skeleton of a human ancestor named Ardi--a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution.In 1994 a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White--the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology--uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia's Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton classified as Ardipithecus ramidus was 4.4 million years old more than a million years older than Lucy then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution--how we started walking upright how we evolved our nimble hands and most significantly whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today's chimpanzee--and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy.Fossil Men is the first full-length exploration of Ardi the fossil men who found her and her impact on what we know about the origins of the human species. It is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body. Kermit Pattison brings into focus a cast of eccentric obsessive scientists including one of the world's greatest fossil hunters Tim White--an exacting and unforgiving fossil hunter whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa a Japanese savant who sometimes didn't bother going home at night to devote more hours to science; Owen Lovejoy a onetime creationist-turned-paleoanthropologist; Berhane Asfaw who survived imprisonment and torture to become Ethiopia's most senior paleoanthropologist and who fought for African scientists to gain equal footing in the study of human origins; and the Leakeys for decades the most famous family in paloanthropology.An intriguing tale of scientific discovery obsession and rivalry that moves from the sun-baked desert of Africa and a nation caught in a brutal civil war to modern high-tech labs and academic lecture halls Fossil Men is popular science at its best and a must read for fans of Jared Diamond Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson.
language: English
title: Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind
publisher: William Morrow