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Author: Nick Merriman
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Published: 1989
Total Pages: 63
ISBN-13: 9780394922577
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Text and photographs present a description of early humans: their origins; their tools and weapons; how they hunted and foraged for food; and the role of family life, money, religion, and magic.
Author: Bo Gräslund
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2005-10-11
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13: 1134261349
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Summarizing modern research on early hominid evolution from the apes six million years ago to the emergence of modern humans, this book is the first to present a synthetic discussion of many aspects of early human life.
Author: Richard Wrangham
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2010-08-06
Total Pages: 309
ISBN-13: 1847652107
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this stunningly original book, Richard Wrangham argues that it was cooking that caused the extraordinary transformation of our ancestors from apelike beings to Homo erectus. At the heart of Catching Fire lies an explosive new idea: the habit of eating cooked rather than raw food permitted the digestive tract to shrink and the human brain to grow, helped structure human society, and created the male-female division of labour. As our ancestors adapted to using fire, humans emerged as "the cooking apes". Covering everything from food-labelling and overweight pets to raw-food faddists, Catching Fire offers a startlingly original argument about how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. "This notion is surprising, fresh and, in the hands of Richard Wrangham, utterly persuasive ... Big, new ideas do not come along often in evolution these days, but this is one." -Matt Ridley, author of Genome
Author: E. Fuller Torrey
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2017-09-05
Total Pages: 338
ISBN-13: 0231544863
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Religions and mythologies from around the world teach that God or gods created humans. Atheist, humanist, and materialist critics, meanwhile, have attempted to turn theology on its head, claiming that religion is a human invention. In this book, E. Fuller Torrey draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to propose a startling answer to the ultimate question. Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods locates the origin of gods within the human brain, arguing that religious belief is a by-product of evolution. Based on an idea originally proposed by Charles Darwin, Torrey marshals evidence that the emergence of gods was an incidental consequence of several evolutionary factors. Using data ranging from ancient skulls and artifacts to brain imaging, primatology, and child development studies, this book traces how new cognitive abilities gave rise to new behaviors. For instance, autobiographical memory, the ability to project ourselves backward and forward in time, gave Homo sapiens a competitive advantage. However, it also led to comprehension of mortality, spurring belief in an alternative to death. Torrey details the neurobiological sequence that explains why the gods appeared when they did, connecting archaeological findings including clothing, art, farming, and urbanization to cognitive developments. This book does not dismiss belief but rather presents religious belief as an inevitable outcome of brain evolution. Providing clear and accessible explanations of evolutionary neuroscience, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods will shed new light on the mechanics of our deepest mysteries.
Author: Héctor M. Manrique
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2017-08-22
Total Pages: 150
ISBN-13: 3319644475
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This work examines the cognitive capacity of great apes in order to better understand early man and the importance of memory in the evolutionary process. It synthesizes research from comparative cognition, neuroscience, primatology as well as lithic archaeology, reviewing findings on the cognitive ability of great apes to recognize the physical properties of an object and then determine the most effective way in which to manipulate it as a tool to achieve a specific goal. The authors argue that apes (Hominoidea) lack the human cognitive ability of imagining how to blend reality, which requires drawing on memory in order to envisage alternative future situations, and thereby modifying behavior determined by procedural memory. This book reviews neuroscientific findings on short-term working memory, long-term procedural memory, prospective memory, and imaginative forward thinking in relation to manual behavior. Since the manipulation of objects by Hominoidea in the wild (particularly in order to obtain food) is regarded as underlying the evolution of behavior in early Hominids, contrasts are highlighted between the former and the latter, especially the cognitive implications of ancient stone-tool preparation.
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Published: 2010-04-17
Total Pages: 128
ISBN-13: 0309148383
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The hominin fossil record documents a history of critical evolutionary events that have ultimately shaped and defined what it means to be human, including the origins of bipedalism; the emergence of our genus Homo; the first use of stone tools; increases in brain size; and the emergence of Homo sapiens, tools, and culture. The Earth's geological record suggests that some evolutionary events were coincident with substantial changes in African and Eurasian climate, raising the possibility that critical junctures in human evolution and behavioral development may have been affected by the environmental characteristics of the areas where hominins evolved. Understanding Climate's Change on Human Evolution explores the opportunities of using scientific research to improve our understanding of how climate may have helped shape our species. Improved climate records for specific regions will be required before it is possible to evaluate how critical resources for hominins, especially water and vegetation, would have been distributed on the landscape during key intervals of hominin history. Existing records contain substantial temporal gaps. The book's initiatives are presented in two major research themes: first, determining the impacts of climate change and climate variability on human evolution and dispersal; and second, integrating climate modeling, environmental records, and biotic responses. Understanding Climate's Change on Human Evolution suggests a new scientific program for international climate and human evolution studies that involve an exploration initiative to locate new fossil sites and to broaden the geographic and temporal sampling of the fossil and archeological record; a comprehensive and integrative scientific drilling program in lakes, lake bed outcrops, and ocean basins surrounding the regions where hominins evolved and a major investment in climate modeling experiments for key time intervals and regions that are critical to understanding human evolution.
Author: Peter Robertshaw
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 178
ISBN-13: 0195161572
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Tells the story of early human life using an incredible variety of primary sources. -- from back cover.
Author: Russell H. Tuttle
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2014-02-17
Total Pages: 1089
ISBN-13: 0674073169
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this masterwork, Russell H. Tuttle synthesizes a vast research literature in primate evolution and behavior to explain how apes and humans evolved in relation to one another, and why humans became a bipedal, tool-making, culture-inventing species distinct from other hominoids. Along the way, he refutes the influential theory that men are essentially killer apes—sophisticated but instinctively aggressive and destructive beings. Situating humans in a broad context, Tuttle musters convincing evidence from morphology and recent fossil discoveries to reveal what early primates ate, where they slept, how they learned to walk upright, how brain and hand anatomy evolved simultaneously, and what else happened evolutionarily to cause humans to diverge from their closest relatives. Despite our genomic similarities with bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas, humans are unique among primates in occupying a symbolic niche of values and beliefs based on symbolically mediated cognitive processes. Although apes exhibit behaviors that strongly suggest they can think, salient elements of human culture—speech, mating proscriptions, kinship structures, and moral codes—are symbolic systems that are not manifest in ape niches. This encyclopedic volume is both a milestone in primatological research and a critique of what is known and yet to be discovered about human and ape potential.
Author: Fiorenzo Facchini
Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books (CT)
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780761327684
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Curriculum Strands: Pre-history evolution of early man.
Author: Bo Gräslund
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2005-10-11
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13: 1134261357
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Summarizing modern research on early hominid evolution from the apes six million years ago to the emergence of modern humans, this book is the first to present a synthetic discussion of many aspects of early human life.
