Beasts Before Us
The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution
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Narrated by:
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Ruth Urquhart
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By:
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Elsa Panciroli
About this listen
For most of us, the story of mammal evolution starts after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, but over the last 20 years, scientists have uncovered new fossils and used new technologies that have upended this story.
In Beasts Before Us, paleontologist Elsa Panciroli charts the emergence of the mammal lineage, Synapsida, beginning at their murky split from the reptiles in the Carboniferous period, over 300 million years ago. They made the world theirs long before the rise of dinosaurs.
Elsa crisscrosses the globe to explore the sites where discoveries are being made and meet the people who make them. In Scotland, she traverses the desert dunes of prehistoric Moray, where quarry workers unearthed the footprints of Permian creatures from before the time of dinosaurs. In South Africa, she introduces us to animals that gave scientists the first hints that our furry kin evolved from a lineage of egg-laying burrowers. In China, new, complete fossilized skeletons reveal mammals that were gliders, shovel-pawed Jurassic moles, and flat-tailed swimmers.
This book radically reframes the narrative of our mammalian ancestors and provides a counterpoint to the stereotypes of mighty dinosaur overlords and cowering little mammals. It turns out the earliest mammals weren't just precursors, they were pioneers.
©2021 Elsa Panciroli (P)2021 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Today it is common knowledge that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite impact 65 million years ago that killed half of all species then living. It is far less widely understood that a much greater catastrophe took place at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago: at least 90 percent of life on earth was destroyed. When Life Nearly Died documents not only what happened during this gigantic mass extinction, but also the recent renewal of the idea of catastrophism.
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Obscurity to Enlightenment - A Mystery Revealed
- By Dipam on 03-18-21
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The Neanderthals Rediscovered
- How Modern Science Is Rewriting Their Story (Revised and Updated Edition)
- By: Dimitra Papagianni, Michael A. Morse
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In recent years, the common perception of the Neanderthals has been transformed, thanks to new discoveries and paradigm-shattering scientific innovations. It turns out that the Neanderthals' behavior was surprisingly modern: they buried the dead, cared for the sick, hunted large animals in their prime, harvested seafood, and communicated with spoken language. Meanwhile, advances in DNA technologies are compelling us to reassess the Neanderthals' place in our own past.
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Fascinating Subject... Soporific Reader
- By Andrew E. Yarosh on 11-21-17
By: Dimitra Papagianni, and others
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Masters of the Planet
- The Search for Our Human Origins
- By: Ian Tattersall
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Fifty thousand years ago - merely a blip in evolutionary time - our Homo sapiens ancestors were competing for existence with several other human species, just as their precursors had done for millions of years. Yet something about our species distinguished it from the pack, and ultimately led to its survival while the rest became extinct. Just what was it that allowed Homo sapiens to become masters of the planet? Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, takes us deep into the fossil record to uncover what made humans so special.
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Great Book, Some Sloppy Editing
- By DB on 11-23-20
By: Ian Tattersall
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The Ancestor's Tale
- A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
- By: Richard Dawkins
- Narrated by: Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Abridged
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In The Ancestor's Tale, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins offers a masterwork: an exhilarating reverse tour through evolution, from present-day humans back to the microbial beginnings of life four billion years ago. Throughout the journey, Dawkins spins entertaining, insightful stories and sheds light on topics such as speciation, sexual selection, and extinction. The Ancestor's Tale is at once an essential education in evolutionary theory and riveting in its telling.
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Please do an unabridged version!
- By MovieExpertise on 09-29-16
By: Richard Dawkins
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Evolution
- What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters: Adapted for Audio
- By: Donald R. Prothero
- Narrated by: John Bishop
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Abridged
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Over the past 20 years, paleontologists have made tremendous fossil discoveries, including fossils that mark the growth of whales, manatees, and seals from land mammals and the origins of elephants, horses, and rhinos. Today there exists an amazing diversity of fossil humans, suggesting we walked upright long before we acquired large brains, and new evidence from molecules that enable scientists to decipher the tree of life as never before.
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NOT WORTH THE PRICE OF ADDMISSION
- By CRAIG on 12-25-14
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Why Evolution Is True
- By: Jerry A. Coyne
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
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Why evolution is more than just a theory: it is a fact. In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant "intelligent design", there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned: the evidence, the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection.
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As great as everyone says it is
- By Joseph on 12-01-10
By: Jerry A. Coyne
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Remarkable Creatures
- Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species
- By: Sean B. Carroll
- Narrated by: Jim Bond
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
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Just 150 years ago, most of our world was an unexplored wilderness. Our sense of its age was vastly off the mark. And what we believed to be the history of our own species consisted of fantastic myths and fairy tales; fossils, known for millennia, were seen as the bones of dragons and other imagined creatures. How did we learn so much so quickly? Remarkable Creatures celebrates the pioneers who replaced our fancies with the even more remarkable real story of how our world evolved.
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A Remarkable Journey
- By Michael Dowd on 03-22-09
By: Sean B. Carroll
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Born in Africa
- The Quest for the Origins of Human Life
- By: Martin Meredith
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
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In Born in Africa, Martin Meredith follows the trail of discoveries about human origins made by scientists over the last hundred years, recounting their intense rivalry, personal feuds, and fierce controversies, as well as their feats of skill and endurance. The results have been momentous. Scientists have identified more than 20 species of extinct humans. They have firmly established Africa as the birthplace not only of humankind but also of modern humans.
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A Brief History of Paleoanthropology
- By Jeff Harris on 05-06-13
By: Martin Meredith
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Ancestors
- A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials
- By: Alice Roberts
- Narrated by: Alice Roberts
- Length: 13 hrs and 48 mins
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We often think of Britain springing from nowhere with the arrival of the Romans. But in Ancestors, pre-eminent archaeologist, broadcaster and academic Professor Alice Roberts explores what we can learn about the very earliest Britons – from their burial sites. Although we have very little evidence of what life was like in prehistorical times, here their stories are told through the bones and funerary offerings left behind, preserved in the ground for thousands of years.
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Current narrative
- By James on 06-26-21
By: Alice Roberts
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First Peoples in a New World
- Colonizing Ice Age America
- By: David J. Meltzer
- Narrated by: Christopher Prince
- Length: 11 hrs
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More than 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America, a continent that was then truly a new world. Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology.
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Last Gasp of American Anthropological Orthodoxy
- By Thomas66 on 01-05-17
By: David J. Meltzer
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In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America's known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent's evolutionary richness. Distinguished scholar Dan Flores's ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the "wild new world" of North America.
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Tough for me to to review
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Today it is common knowledge that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite impact 65 million years ago that killed half of all species then living. It is far less widely understood that a much greater catastrophe took place at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago: at least 90 percent of life on earth was destroyed. When Life Nearly Died documents not only what happened during this gigantic mass extinction, but also the recent renewal of the idea of catastrophism.
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What listeners say about Beasts Before Us
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Nancy K. Merbitz
- 02-03-23
Love this book!
incisive, informative, passionate and sometimes humorous. The reader’s Scottish accent fits since the author is Scottish. So much I didn’t know. Mammals started as early as the reptiles started. So interesting.
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- David J.
- 10-18-24
Absolutely made me cry
I always love learning something new for the first time and this wonderful book gave me a wealth of knowledge on early mammal history. Epilogue made me weep whilst sharing the story with my partner.
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- Chromazar
- 09-02-22
Bitter Misandry Historical Fiction
Half the book is spent talking about the archeologists she hates. Would've been 5 stars if she just stuck to the evolutionary tale.
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7 people found this helpful
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- J. Brady Zieman
- 09-25-23
Enjoyable and concise analysis of early mammalian history
This book is great. I really enjoyed Panciroli’s writing style and her lightly sardonic sense of humor made me laugh out loud a couple times. Foremost, her book focus on on how the permian through Jurassic evolution of mammals created the blueprints for traits we see today. In this, her expertise shines. The narrative is both informative and fascinating.
Additionally, her feminist perspective is refreshing and much needed. More importantly, it’s not particularly intrusive in the flow of the book. She simply places women in their well deserved places in paleontological history and highlights their importance. You can ignore the reviews who dwell on “misandry” and and such.
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2 people found this helpful
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- 310bonita
- 07-25-22
A writer of wit
This book is packed full of science, wise cracks and wit. It is an easy listening because the author’s character comes through the book but does not overwhelm it. She covers so many different areas to bring us the epic history of mammals on earth. What an incredible mind and view of the world! I would dig fossils with her any day. Thank you.
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- Erik Johnsrud
- 04-06-23
better with illustrations
I found this book interesting with many insights into mammalian evolution that have been overlooked in the past. I have a better idea of the extent of mammalian development. however, I am sure that I would have gotten more out of the book if I had had a hard copy that I could be looking at illustrations and examples.
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- MR M B HENDERSON
- 05-01-24
Detailed discovery
Well written and read giving a detailed history of the evolution of mammals and other creatures. Loved it.
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- onychophora
- 02-24-24
A delightful adventure with our weird, wild ancestors
I love this book’s humor and wit. I noticed other reviewers pointed out “leftist” and “woke” ideology. Were that the case, I might have been put off, as this is a science book and not a political one. All she spouts are facts. Delicious facts mixed with truly interesting stories. Our synapsid ancestors are totally weird, yet fascinating. I wonder whether we’d have evolved if the P-T mass extinction never happened. Maybe we would be just the same but in Moschops bodies. Get this book. It’s awesome.
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- Trevor Shultz
- 07-28-22
thoroughly enjoyable
Full of interesting information and written well. the narrator was excellent.
There were some other reviews that made me almost not want to read it but I'm glad i did.
First the narrator has a scottish accent which makes sense since the author is also scottish. She is very clear and easy to understand. if you are afraid you wont be able to understand the sample audio is a good representation.
Secondly this book is not preachy at all, which is what i was afraid of based on other reviews. The author mentions the contributions of a wide range of scientists and describes the cultural context they were working in. If readers have an issue with that i would suggest that is their own bias.
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1 person found this helpful
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- wbiro
- 09-21-22
A Top Tier Science Popularizing Book and Writer
And a cutting-edge book, since, as revealed by the book, most of the information on the history of mammals is outdated, and it may take years to correct, it is so ingrained.
Though the book not as broad as A Short History of Nearly Everything (but broad nevertheless), it is at the same stratospheric level in terms of a writer/narrator fit. The narrator gets off to a slow start, but don't let that fool you, because when she gets going, she really gets going, and the writer feeds her many entertaining idioms and perspectives that only the delightfully exasperated Scottish accent can give us, and, as a bonus, we get rare female-generated analogies ('dry as a biscuit'), and, as a further bonus, the writer could not resist going novel on us from time to time (usually a bad thing), taking us on a tour through scenes as if it were a suspense/adventure novel, risky, but she did an enjoyable job of it (while no doubt satisfying some of her novel-writing aspirations).
Scientifically, the book will straighten you out on the deep lineage of mammals (case in point: where they and reptiles split from the same tetrapod origin, meaning reptiles are not in the mammal lineage (like monkeys and humans are not) as most people would surmise, given the outdated information on the Internet), which most of us have misconstrued and have a weak grasp on. The chapter 'Jurassic Mammals' being a case in point - where were they in the Jurassic Park films? Most Likely Answer: the filmmakers had no idea that mammals existed way back then beyond little shrew-like creatures, thereby misleading the public (and a very large one at that) (but then they were misled themselves with the erroneous conclusions of the time).
Conclusion: This book will bring you up to date, and get you beyond the outdated information still being presented (even by Wikipedia, and even in Britannica) on the Internet, which must be very frustrating for those working on the frontiers of science...
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1 person found this helpful