{"product_id":"the-first-human-isbn-9781400076963","title":"The First Human","description":"In this  dynamic account, award-winning science writer Ann Gibbons chronicles an extraordinary quest to answer the most primal of questions: When and where was the dawn of humankind?Following four intensely competitive international teams of scientists in a heated race to find the “missing link”–the fossil of the earliest human ancestor–Gibbons ventures to Africa, where she encounters a fascinating array of fossil hunters: Tim White, the irreverent Californian who discovered the partial skeleton of a primate that lived 4.4 million years ago in Ethiopia; French paleontologist Michel Brunet, who uncovers a skull in Chad that could date the beginnings of humankind to seven million years ago; and two other groups–one led by zoologist Meave Leakey, the other by British geologist Martin Pickford and his French paleontologist partner, Brigitte Senut–who enter the race with landmark discoveries of their own. Through scrupulous research and vivid first-person reporting, \u003ci\u003eThe First Human\u003c\/i\u003e reveals the perils and the promises of fossil hunting on a grand competitive scale.“A wonderful, balanced, and accurate account of the search for the oldest human ancestors and the personages involved in this quest. Gibbons provides a revealing window into the house of horrors that can be human origins research.”—\u003ci\u003eScience\u003c\/i\u003e“Thrilling.... Gibbons [writes] with great flair.” —\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e“An entertaining, richly detailed story, told with clarity and a commanding grasp of the complexities of human origins.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Plain Dealer\u003c\/i\u003e“Colorful and readable. . . . Like a detective story that puts Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade, V.I. Warshawski, Easy Rawlins and Gil Grissom all in the same room, gives them a handful of clues, and lets them argue endlessly about the solution. Science writing is rarely this entertaining.”—\u003ci\u003eSan Jose Mercury News\u003c\/i\u003eAnn Gibbons, the primary writer on human evolution for \u003ci\u003eScience\u003c\/i\u003e magazine for more than a decade, has taught science writing at Carnegie Mellon University. She has been a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Science Journalism Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. www.anngibbons.comCHAPTER ONE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAFRICAN TRAILBLAZERS\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMost scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history  than their logic.  \u003cbr\u003e-Ernst Mayr, evolutionary biologist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was told as a young student not to waste my time searching for Early Man in Africa, since \"everyone knew he had started in Asia.\"\u003cbr\u003e-Louis Leakey, 1966\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was an October morning in 2003. Meave Leakey was driving from Nairobi  north along the eastern wall of the Rift Valley in central Kenya, expertly  weaving around potholes in the tarmac and dodging oncoming buses that played  chicken with smaller vehicles to scare them out of their way. Trucks belched  black smoke that stung her eyes, cyclists hitched rides up hills holding on  to the backs of buses, and jam-packed public shuttles called matatus spent  almost as much time passing each other as staying on their side of the  two-lane road. As Meave negotiated this nerve-racking traffic on the Uplands  Road between Nairobi and Nakuru, she calmly recounted the story of how the  search for human ancestors began in eastern Africa. \"Until the middle of  1959, only a few people seriously believed eastern Africa was a sensible  place to look for the earliest human ancestors,\" she said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis history is personal for her, because it is the saga of her husband's  parents, Louis and Mary Leakey. This formidable pair was among the first to  stake their careers on Africa as the birthplace of mankind. For three  decades, their work in eastern Africa was an almost solitary pursuit. Even  those researchers who found fossils of early ape-men in South Africa during  that time had trouble convincing their European colleagues that these  primitive fossils were ancestors of humans. Then, in 1959, Mary found a  fossil in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, that would finally give the Leakeys the  hard evidence they had long sought that early humans did indeed evolve in  eastern Africa. Louis named the cranium, or partial skull, \u003ci\u003eZinjanthropus  boisei\u003c\/i\u003e--\u003ci\u003eZinj\u003c\/i\u003e from an Arabic word for eastern Africa, \u003ci\u003eanthropus\u003c\/i\u003e from the  Greek word for man, and \u003ci\u003eboisei\u003c\/i\u003e from Charles Boise, a London businessman who  was their benefactor. Translated, the name is an assertion: \"Man from  Eastern Africa.\" And once the Man from Eastern Africa made his appearance,  the push was on to find more extinct men and women. Soon, teams of French  and American researchers headed to eastern Africa, like forty-niners to  California during the gold rush. The fossils they found in the Great Rift  Valley in the 1960s and 1970s soon made it known as the cradle of humanity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut Louis's search for the missing link in eastern Africa had started more  than thirty years earlier, right in the gullies and rock shelters alongside  the Uplands Road where Meave was driving nearly eighty years later, high  above the Great Rift Valley. In 1926, the first year that Louis worked in  the area, the Uplands Road did not exist, and the trip from Nairobi in  Louis's Model T Ford took a half day over muddy tracks. The air was so clear  that Louis could see miles across the Great Rift Valley from his camp, down  a slope covered with acacia trees and scrub brush to Lake Elmenteita, a  shallow alkaline lake rimmed with the pink froth of flamingos. Bush babies,  leopards, aardvarks, and ibises lived in the acacia woodlands near the  shore, and a herd of hippos wallowed in the lake. Beyond the lake, the  jagged calderas of several extinct volcanoes lined up to form the silhouette  of a human figure that the local Masai tribesmen called Elngiragata  Olmorani, for Sleeping Warrior. A few British settlers were staking out the  Masai's traditional grazing grounds for homesteads for cattle ranches, but  otherwise the area was still remote and primeval.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eToday, Elmenteita is only an hour's drive beyond the shanty sprawl  surrounding Nairobi, and much of the land around the lake is fenced in by  private owners. The hippos are gone and the bush babies and a few remaining  leopards have retreated to a wildlife sanctuary. But the view of the rift  valley far below is still stunning, and Meave named the volcanoes visible in  the distance as she searched for a familiar turnoff. Spotting it, she  jostled down a dirt road, past a quarry where workers mined a crumbly white  rock called diatomite, and pulled into a grassy driveway. The sign said: Kariandusi Museum, National Museums of Kenya. It did not look like much: a  guard's hut and a whitewashed, single-room museum with some casts of skulls  and an exhibit on the formation of the Great Rift Valley. It was clearly off  the tourists' safari circuit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA curator eventually appeared, delighted to find someone who wanted to tour  the site on a Monday in October. He was even more surprised to find out that  the tall woman with straight, silver-gray hair and hazel eyes spoke Swahili  and was a member of the Leakey family--a name that is well-known in Kenya.  At sixty-one, Meave had been here many times before and knew the history of  Kariandusi by heart. She is long-legged and fit after a lifetime of hard  work scrambling over rugged terrain for fossils, and she did not need a  guide to lead her into the gulch. She let the curator show her the way to a  series of steplike pits anyway, partly because she was curious to learn what  he knew. He took her to the first pit, which was covered with a corrugated  metal roof. Meave leaned over the rail and pointed to the dirt floor  encrusted with hundreds of stone tools, most made of glassy black obsidian,  the rock that comes from volcanic lava. There were tear-shaped hand axes,  two-sided flakes, and even triplets of round stones that look like black  billiard balls. \"This is where it all began,\" said Meave. She was referring  to Louis's search for early man in eastern Africa. These shiny black tools  at Kariandusi were among the first hard evidence of a sophisticated ancient  Stone Age culture in eastern Africa. They were made by people who left them  on the shores of the lake almost 500,000 years ago, perhaps when they came  to hunt wild animals that were quenching their thirst at dawn or dusk. She  climbed down wooden stairs into a deep gully where an ibis was roosting in a  tree. Meave remembered a photo from \u003ci\u003eNational Geographic\u003c\/i\u003e that showed Louis  bending over a cliff there, pointing to stone tools embedded in the wall.  This was precisely the spot where Louis and his team found their first  ancient hand axes in eastern Africa in 1929.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e * * * \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1871, less than sixty years earlier, Charles Darwin had proposed in \u003ci\u003eThe Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex\u003c\/i\u003e, that the earliest ancestors  of humans probably lived on the African continent. But that prediction was  based on absolutely no evidence from fossils. In fact, at the time only one  fossil of another type of human being was known, and that was of a  Neandertal that had lived in the Neander valley of Germany sometime in the  past 70,000 years. Darwin chose Africa because humans' closest cousins in  the animal kingdom--chimpanzees and gorillas--lived in Africa; therefore, he  wrote, \"it is more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African  continent than elsewhere.\" But Darwin admitted that it was \"useless to  speculate on this subject,\" since an extinct European ape nearly as large as  humans could also have given rise to humans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat didn't stop Darwin's colleagues from conjecture. His friend and  champion Thomas Henry Huxley (also known as Darwin's \"bulldog\") agreed that  humans should be put in the same family as chimpanzees and gorillas, and  enthusiastically promoted that view in debates and in his 1863 book \u003ci\u003eEvidence as to Man's Place in Nature\u003c\/i\u003e. (Darwin himself avoided dealing directly with  the issue until 1871, when he published \u003ci\u003eThe Descent of Man\u003c\/i\u003e.) But a  contemporary and admirer of Darwin's, the prominent German biologist Ernst  Haeckel, believed that the Asian apes (orangutans and gibbons) were closer  relatives of humans than the African apes were. Haeckel proposed this link  in his sketches of the human family tree in 1868, drawing a direct line  between Asian apes and a new species of fossil human that he proposed and  explicitly called the missing link. In his writings and lectures, Haeckel  fleshed out this missing link as a hairy, primitive creature half ape, half  man, named \u003ci\u003ePithecanthropus alalus\u003c\/i\u003e. (Literally, \"ape-man without speech,\"  from the Greek \u003ci\u003epithec\u003c\/i\u003e, \"ape,\" \u003ci\u003eanthropus\u003c\/i\u003e, \"man,\" and \u003ci\u003ealalus\u003c\/i\u003e, \"without  speech.\") It walked semierect, had protruding teeth, and was speechless. But  there wasn't a bit of hard evidence to support this vision of an ape-man.  Haeckel's missing link was purely theoretical.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne person who heard of Haeckel's ideas on human evolution was a young Dutch  medical student, Eugène Dubois, who became the first of a long line of young  men obsessed with finding this missing link--and winning honor and fortune.  In 1887, when Dubois couldn't get the Dutch government to finance an  expedition to the tropics to search for fossils, he quit his job as an  anatomist at the University of Amsterdam and joined the Royal Dutch East  Indies Army as a military doctor so he could be posted to the Dutch East  Indies, now the Indonesian archipelago. Ancient fossils of mammals that had  been alive during the earliest stages of the Age of Man (the Pleistocene  epoch) had been found there. He thought it most likely that fossils of  extinct ancestors of similar age would be preserved there as well. According  to his biographer, the anthropologist Pat Shipman, he also reasoned that if  apes lived in the tropics today, extinct apes and early ape-men would also  have been more likely to live in the tropics.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was an incredible long shot, but he sailed for the Dutch East Indies at  the age of twenty-nine with his young wife and their baby. Dubois was the  first of many fossil hunters to risk his life in search of an elusive  missing link. He battled malarial fever without modern medicines; his team  hemorrhaged workers, who ran away, became ill, or stole fossils to sell as  \"dragon\" bones to traders from China; and they faced bad roads through the  overgrown jungles of Java, mosquitoes, hellish heat, and torrential rains.  Amazingly, Dubois and his family survived. More incredibly, he found what he  was looking for. In August 1891, his crew discovered the molar of a hominid  eroding out of the banks of the Solo River near the village of Trinil on the  island of Java. Two months later, his crew found a skullcap that was larger  than that of a chimpanzee's but smaller than that of a human's. Later, they  found a thighbone. Dubois recognized the skullcap as belonging to a species  that must have had a brain intermediate in size and development between  humans and apes. But the thighbone belonged to a creature that walked  upright--even before its brain had expanded.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe pronounced it \u003ci\u003ePithecanthropus erectus\u003c\/i\u003e (or \"erect ape-man\"). It was an  amazing feat. He had never searched for fossils but had nonetheless traveled  halfway around the world to an island archipelago where he'd \u003ci\u003ereasoned \u003c\/i\u003ethat  such fossils should be found. Today, Dubois's Java man is still recognized  as a major discovery--the first fossil found of an early hominid and the  first specimen of \u003ci\u003eHomo erectus\u003c\/i\u003e (as it was later renamed), a key human  ancestor that arose about 1.8 million years ago, probably in Africa, before  migrating to Asia, where it persisted until sometime in the past 250,000  years. This species of human and its descendants may even have lived until  as recently as 13,000 years ago in the form of the so-called Hobbit, the  dwarf species of human whose remains were found in 2004 on the Indonesian  island of Flores.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eConvincing his colleagues that he had found the missing link would prove  more difficult than finding the fossils themselves. When Dubois announced  his discovery of Java man in 1893, he expected honor and scientific  recognition. Instead, his monograph on this \"man-ape\" was met with  skepticism and snide comments, some dismissing the fossil as a giant gibbon  or an individual whose features had been distorted by disease or a wound.  Word reached him in Java in 1894 that his European colleagues questioned  many aspects of his monograph on the fossil--from his claim that all the  fossils came from the same individual to the way his crew had mapped the  fossil site.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDubois traveled to Europe in 1895 to defend his discovery, winning a few  converts as he lectured and displayed the bones themselves. Haeckel, who had  inspired him, was one who embraced Java man as a human ancestor. But the  theory of evolution was still new and was not universally accepted among  scholars. Although Dubois was well educated and a meticulous scientist,  perhaps the real problem was that an ancestor that looked so much like an  ape was more than the scientific establishment of the late nineteenth  century could accept. His biographer Shipman concluded, \"In truth, the  problem lay more in the prevailing beliefs among his colleagues than in  Dubois' shortcomings.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs he battled his colleagues well into the twentieth century, Dubois's own  shortcomings also became apparent--he grew secretive and territorial about  his fossils, particularly after he gave a cast to a German anatomist who  then toured the world with it, giving lectures and publishing a detailed  description about Java man before Dubois had finished his own analysis of  the skull he had found. After that, he withdrew from his colleagues and even  rigged a mirror above his door at home so he could see who was there when  his maid answered, turning away prominent scientists who'd traveled from as  far as America to see the fossils that he stored in his basement.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHistory would prove Dubois right about Java man, but he died an angry man,  unrecognized and estranged from his wife and friends--all alienated by his  increasing irascibility. He was, perhaps, the first fossil hunter to become  a victim of his own success in finding a human ancestor, as if the fossil  came with a mummy's curse.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was a bitter omen of the kind of controversy that would swirl around  almost every new fossil vying to be a human ancestor. Even experienced  researchers often react with more emotion to the discovery of human  ancestors than they do to fossils of any other animal, including dinosaurs.  New fossils almost always shatter preconceived notions of what our ancestors  should look like, revealing our origins as ordinary apes rather than as  exalted beings marked from the beginning with a big brain or some other sign  of special destiny. Darwin recognized this reflexive denial of our savage  past in \u003ci\u003eThe Descent of Man \u003c\/i\u003ewhen he warned, \"We must, however, acknowledge,  as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy  which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to  other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect  which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar  system--with all these exalted powers--Man still bears in his bodily frame  the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.\"","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299976073445,"sku":"NP9781400076963","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400076963.jpg?v=1767739349","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-first-human-isbn-9781400076963","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}