Lowly Origin
Subtitle: Where, When, and Why Our Ancestors First Stood Up
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: April 7, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 408
ISBN-13: 9780691050867
Subjects: Early man; Evolution; Origin; Human evolution; Science; Science/Mathematics; Life Sciences - Evolution - Human; Anthropology; Biological Sciences; Science / Evolution; Human beings; Life Sciences - Evolution; Bipedalism; Fossil hominids
First sentence: Why Lowly Origin? Peculiarity of bipedalism and role of geography and ecology in explaining it.
Description: "Lowly Origin is the first book to explain the sources and consequences of bipedalism to a broad audience. Along the way, it accounts for recent fossil discoveries that show us a still incomplete but much bushier family tree than most of us learned about in school." "Jonathan Kingdon uses the very latest findings from ecology, biogeography, and paleontology to build a new and up-to-date account of how four-legged apes became two-legged hominins. He describes what it took to get up onto two legs as well as the protracted consequences of that step - some of which led straight to modern humans and others to very different bipeds. This allows him to make sense of recently unearthed evidence suggesting that no fewer than twenty species of humans and hominins have lived and become extinct. Following the evolution of two-legged creatures from our earliest lowly forebears to the present, Kingdon concludes with future options for the last surviving biped."--Jacket.