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Review
"...a compelling story...it's a tale worth reading..." (Focus, July 2002)
Product Description
A bold new theory on what sparked the "big bang" of human culture
The abrupt emergence of human culture over a stunningly short period continues to be one of the great enigmas of human evolution. This compelling book introduces a bold new theory on this unsolved mystery. Author Richard Klein reexamines the archaeological evidence and brings in new discoveries in the study of the human brain. These studies detail the changes that enabled humans to think and behave in far more sophisticated ways than before, resulting in the incredibly rapid evolution of new skills. Richard Klein has been described as "the premier anthropologist in the country today" by Evolutionary Anthropology. Here, he and coauthor Blake Edgar shed new light on the full story of a truly fascinating period of evolution.
Richard G. Klein, PhD (Palo Alto, CA), is a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. He is the author of the definitive academic book on the subject of the origins of human culture, The Human Career. Blake Edgar (San Francisco, CA) is the coauthor of the very successful From Lucy to Language, with Dr. Donald Johanson. He has written extensively for Discover, GEO, and numerous other magazines.
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First Sentence
High above the western shore of Lake Naivasha, a blue pool on the parched floor of East Africa's Great Rift Valley, sits a small rock-shelter carved into the Mau Escarpment. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
High above the western shore of Lake Naivasha, a blue pool on the parched floor of East Africa's Great Rift Valley, sits a small rock-shelter carved into the Mau Escarpment. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
What were we waiting for?,
By
This review is from: The Dawn of Human Culture (Hardcover)
Juxtaposing two dates in human evolution poses a mystery. Anatomically modern people (with our bodies, brains, and genes) apparently first appear in Africa 100,000 years ago. Yet there is no evidence of them behaving like us--no evidence of modern human culture--until 50,000 years ago. For the first 50,000 years of our existence we were archaeologically indistinct from Neanderthal or erectus. Then everything quickly changed, forever. Why this gap? What were we waiting for? Klein, a leading American paleoanthropologist, denies that these facts are complete. There had to be more biological evolution, right up to the moment people started behaving like modern humans, which he attributes to a relatively recent genetic mutation. Yet it is biologically possible that "the dawn of culture" is not a biological event at all. It could be a cascade of consequences following the delayed expression of what Steven Jay Gould calls an evolutionary spandrel, a coincidental side-consequence of evolved structures, not directly shaped by natural selection. Modern culture would have been potential from the biological beginning, but waited on an expression it took time and circumstance to discover.This review originally appeared in Common Knowledge, vol. 9 (2003).
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Misleading Title, May be good otherwise,
By Elizabeth A Triano "lizziewriter" (In Transition, NY (watch this space)) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Dawn of Human Culture (Hardcover)
Looks like I will be the minority voice in these ratings. While _The Dawn of Human Culture_ does cover many aspects of human evolution clearly and well, explaining theories and pitfalls, and including a lot of clear sketches, most of the book is just that, a rehash of evolutionary theory. The authors don't get to the subject at hand until very late in the book (in fact, I haven't finished reading yet, and only the knowledge that they do eventually make some sort of a point is keeping me reading it). I think I would have enjoyed the book more if I had been better prepared going in, because I kept expecting to read something really new and interesting.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very plausible synthesis,
By
This review is from: The Dawn of Human Culture (Hardcover)
Klein tells the six million-year-old story of human evolution from a "splitter's" perspective. Accordingly, H. habilis is distinguished from rudolphensis, and the Asian H. erectus from the African ergaster and the European antecessor. Neandertals are accorded some humanity, but are treated as a separate species. They evidently lacked the inferred genetic mutation for modern speech that supposedly arose some 50 kya. While Klein avoids any mention of the earlier evidence for speech, and argues away inconvenient dates, he offers a coherent synthesis of all the recent data.
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