5/9/2023 0 Comments Fossil men kermitIt’s a journalistic maxim that readers prefer personalities to events, and Pattison describes plenty of ambitious, media-savvy researchers whose often bitter hostility has stalled progress but makes for lively reading. The result is a satisfying education on the status of the human family tree over the past 5 million years, and the author provides detailed explanations of how anthropologists tease information from bones, teeth, and local geology. Pattison caught the bug in 2012 and devoted seven years to gathering material. Perhaps once a decade, a journalist recounts the history and latest findings in human evolution, a subject of apparently endless appeal-Martin Meredith’s Born in Africa (2011) remains a page-turner. An entertaining update on a process as “red in tooth and claw” as nature itself.
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