Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness

In Becoming Human, noted anthropologist and renaissance man Ian Tattersall explores what makes us uniquely human, the qualities that set us apart from our ancestors, and the significance of our knowledge. A worldwide tour of discovery, Tattersall takes the reader from 30,000-year-old cave paintings in France and anthropological digs in Africa, to examining human behavior in a New York restaurant. And by offering wisdom gleaned from fossil remains, primate behavior, prehistoric art, and archaeology, Tattersall presents a stunning picture of where humankind evolved, how Darwin's theories have changed, and what we reliably know about modern-day human's capacity for love, language, and thought. Widely praised in the media, and an Amazon.com Top-10 bestseller, Becoming Human is an amazing trip into the past and into the future.
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"In this superbly written book, Ian Tattersall combines his unique knowledge of the human fossil record, Paleolithic archaeology, primate behavior, prehistoric art, as well as the workings of the human brain and our extraordinary cognitive powers, to offer a convincing scenario of how we have come to hold dominion over the earth."—Donald Johanson (author of From Lucy to Language) in Scientific American

"An ambitious effort . . . Tattersall meets the challenge commendably."—The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Although many popular anthropological accounts of the human species have been written, few are as engaging as that of Ian Tattersall."—Natural History