Fossil Men
The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind
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Narrated by:
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Roger Wayne
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By:
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Kermit Pattison
About this listen
A behind-the-scenes account of the discovery of the oldest skeleton of a human ancestor, named "Ardi"—a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution.
In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White—"the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology"—uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia's Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than "Lucy," then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution—how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today's chimpanzee—and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy.
Fossil Men is the first full-length exploration of Ardi, the fossil men who found her, and her impact on what we know about the origins of the human species. It is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body. Kermit Pattison brings into focus a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including one of the world's greatest fossil hunters, Tim White—an exacting and unforgiving fossil hunter whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant who sometimes didn't bother going home at night to devote more hours to science; Owen Lovejoy, a onetime creationist-turned-paleoanthropologist; Berhane Asfaw, who survived imprisonment and torture to become Ethiopia's most senior paleoanthropologist and who fought for African scientists to gain equal footing in the study of human origins; and the Leakeys, for decades the most famous family in paleoanthropology.
An intriguing tale of scientific discovery, obsession and rivalry that moves from the sun-baked desert of Africa and a nation caught in a brutal civil war, to modern high-tech labs and academic lecture halls, Fossil Men is popular science at its best, and a must-listen for fans of Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2020 Kermit Pattison (P)2020 HarperAudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Spectacular fossil finds make today's headlines; new technology unlocks secrets of skeletons unearthed 100 years ago. Still, evolution is often poorly represented by the media and misunderstood by the public. A potent antidote to pseudoscience, Written in Stone is an engrossing history of evolutionary discovery for anyone who has marveled at the variety and richness of life.
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Very good but has some weaknesses
- By Anonymous User on 06-23-19
By: Brian Switek
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The World Before Us
- The New Science Behind Our Human Origins
- By: Tom Higham
- Narrated by: John Sackville
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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A fascinating investigation of the origin of humans based on incredible new discoveries and advanced scientific technology.
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Wonderfully Accessible
- By Deborah N on 11-02-21
By: Tom Higham
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The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
- A New History of a Lost World
- By: Steve Brusatte
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In this stunning narrative spanning more than 200 million years, Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field - discovering 10 new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork - masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy.
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"The Rise of the Scientists Who Study Dinosaurs"
- By Daniel Powell on 09-16-18
By: Steve Brusatte
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Almost Human
- The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story
- By: Lee Berger, John Hawks
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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A story of defiance and determination by a controversial scientist, this is Lee Berger's own take on finding Homo naledi, an all-new species on the human family tree and one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century. In 2013, Lee Berger, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, heard of a cache of bones in a hard-to-reach underground cave in South Africa. He put out a call around the world for petite collaborators - men and women small and adventurous enough to be able to squeeze through eight-inch tunnels to reach a sunless cave forty feet underground. It worked.
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A deep story on the rocky trail to human origins
- By Peter Matthews on 01-14-19
By: Lee Berger, 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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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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How to Build a Dinosaur
- Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever
- By: Jack Horner, James Gorman
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In movies, in novels, in comic strips, and on television, we've all seen dinosaurs - or at least somebody's educated guess of what they would look like. But what if it were possible to build, or grow, a real dinosaur without finding ancient DNA? Jack Horner, the scientist who advised Steven Spielberg on the blockbuster film Jurassic Park and a pioneer in bringing paleontology into the 21st century, teams up with the editor of the New York Times's Science Times section to reveal exactly what's in store.
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Good book but misplaced title
- By Robert on 06-19-15
By: Jack Horner, and others
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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
- Unabridged
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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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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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Overall
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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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When Humans Nearly Vanished
- The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano
- By: Donald R. Prothero
- Narrated by: Qarie Marshall
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Some 73,000 years ago, the Mount Toba supervolcano in toda's Indonesia erupted, releasing the energy of a million tons of explosives. So much ash and debris was injected into the stratosphere that it partially blocked the sun's radiation and caused global temperatures to drop for a decade. In this book, Donald R. Prothero presents the controversial argument that the Toba catastrophe nearly wiped out the human race, leaving only about a thousand to ten thousand breeding pairs of humans worldwide.
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A very special book
- By Scott Fitzsimmons on 02-02-19
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America Before
- The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
- By: Graham Hancock
- Narrated by: Graham Hancock
- Length: 17 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Stunning new archaeological discoveries in North America together with new genetic evidence have launched a revolution in our understanding of the remote past of our species and of the origins of civilization. Graham Hancock, the internationally best-selling author has been overwhelmingly vindicated by recent discoveries. America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization is a mind-dilating exploration of the mystery of ancient civilizations, amazing archaeological discoveries, and profound implications for how we lead our lives today.
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Fun to Think About
- By Amazon Customer on 04-26-19
By: Graham Hancock
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The Jesuit and the Skull
- Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man
- By: Amir D. Aczel
- Narrated by: Barrett Whitener
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In December 1929, in a cave near Peking, a group of anthropologists and archaeologists that included a young French Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin uncovered a prehuman skull. The find quickly became known around the world as Peking Man and was acclaimed as the missing link between erect hunting apes and our Cro-Magnon ancestors. It also became a provocative piece of evidence in the roiling debate over creationism versus evolution.
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More skull than Jesuit
- By connie on 10-25-07
By: Amir D. Aczel
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Why have societies all across the world feared witchcraft? This book delves deeply into its context, beliefs, and origins in Europe's history. The witch came to prominence - and often a painful death - in early modern Europe, yet her origins are much more geographically diverse and historically deep. In this landmark book, Ronald Hutton traces witchcraft from the ancient world to the early modern state.
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Very interesting, while it was about clocks.
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Interesting subject, poor execution
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Captivating and well crafted
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Why have societies all across the world feared witchcraft? This book delves deeply into its context, beliefs, and origins in Europe's history. The witch came to prominence - and often a painful death - in early modern Europe, yet her origins are much more geographically diverse and historically deep. In this landmark book, Ronald Hutton traces witchcraft from the ancient world to the early modern state.
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Meticulously researched, dry but great.
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Very interesting, while it was about clocks.
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Remarkably little is known about the European eel, Anguilla anguilla. So little, in fact, that scientists and philosophers have, for centuries, been obsessed with what has become known as the “eel question”: Where do eels come from? What are they? Are they fish or some other kind of creature altogether? Even in our age of advanced science, no one has ever seen eels mating or giving birth, and we still don’t understand what drives them, after living for decades in freshwater, to swim great distances back to the ocean at the end of their lives. They remain a mystery.
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Fascinating and profound
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Cave of Bones
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In the summer of 2022, Lee Berger lost 50 pounds in order to wriggle though impossibly small openings in the Rising Star cave complex in South Africa—spaces where his team has been unearthing the remains of Homo naledi, a proto-human likely to have coexisted with Homo sapiens some 250,000 years ago. Lead researcher Berger had never made his way into the dark, cramped, dangerous underground spaces where many of the naledi fossils had been found. Now he was ready to do so. Once inside the cave, Berger made shocking new discoveries that expand our understanding of this early hominid.
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Engaging and interesting but may trigger claustrophobia
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Most Delicious Poison
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Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake, a poppy seed, a mold spore, a foxglove leaf, a magic-mushroom cap, a marijuana bud, or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin), recover from surgery (opioids), cure infections (penicillin), mend our hearts (digoxin), bend our minds (psilocybin), calm our nerves (CBD), and even kill our enemies (cyanide). But why do plants and fungi produce such chemicals? And how did we come to use and abuse some of them?
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Off topic
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The never-before-told story of NASA’s 1978 astronaut class, which included the first American women, the first African Americans, the first Asian American, and the first gay person to fly to space. With the exclusive participation of the astronauts who were there, this is the thrilling, behind-the-scenes saga of a new generation that transformed space exploration.
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As Far As It went
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Silent Earth
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In the tradition of Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking environmental classic Silent Spring, an award-winning entomologist and conservationist explains the importance of insects to our survival and offers a clarion call to avoid a looming ecological disaster of our own making.
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Important book for all
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Snyder was eight years old when her mother died, and her distraught father thrust the family into an evangelical, cult-like existence halfway across the country. Furiously rebellious, she was expelled from school and home at age sixteen. Living out of her car and relying on strangers, Rachel found herself masquerading as an adult, talking her way into college, and eventually traveling the globe.
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Excellent!
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Confessions of a Funeral Director
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Death. It happens to everyone, yet most of us don't want to talk about this final chapter of existence. Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde intimately understands this reticence and fear. The son of an undertaker, he hesitated to embrace the legacy of running his family's business. Yet he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones profoundly changed his faith and his perspective on death - and life itself.
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Good Story, But narrator is the wrong guy
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The 15th century Romanian Prince Vlad III Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler, is one of the most fascinating personalities of medieval history. Already during his own lifetime, his true story became obscured by a veil of myths. As a result, he has been portrayed both as a bloody tyrant - who degenerated down throughout the centuries into the fictional vampire of the same name created by Bram Stoker at the end of the 19th century - and as a national and Christian hero who bravely fought to defend his native land and all of Europe against the invading Turkish infidels.
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The Definitive Biography of the Historical Dracula
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Lucy
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Story
When Donald Johanson found a partial skeleton, approximately 3.5 million years old, in a remote region of Ethiopia in 1974, a headline-making controversy was launched that continues today. Bursting with all the suspense and intrigue of a fast-paced adventure novel, here is Johanson’s lively account of the extraordinary discovery of “Lucy.” By expounding the controversial change Lucy makes in our view of human origins, Johanson provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of the history of paleoanthropology and the colorful, eccentric characters who were, and are, a part of it.
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Powerful and terrific
- By Peter S. Saucier on 01-08-20
By: Donald C. Johanson, and others
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A Short History of (Nearly) Everything Paranormal
- Our Secret Powers Telepathy, Clairvoyance & Precognition
- By: Terje G. Simonsen
- Narrated by: Robbie Stevens
- Length: 15 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the most entertaining and broad survey of the paranormal ever made, combining forgotten lore, evidence from parapsychological experiments and the testament of scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists, psychologists, physicists, philosophers, and also quite a few celebrities. Exploring the possibility that paranormal phenomena may be and that some most likely are objectively real, this travelogue through the twilight zone of human consciousness is both scientifically rigorous and extremely entertaining.
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Cons: "Emperor of USA" Obama Joke & Trump-Bashing
- By O. on 07-30-23
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The Diary Keepers
- World War II in the Netherlands, as Written by the People Who Lived Through It
- By: Nina Siegal
- Narrated by: Nina Siegal, Maggi-Meg Reed, Nan McNamara, and others
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to record this unparalleled time, and maintained by devoted archivists, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before, from the stories of a Nazi sympathizing police officer to a Jewish journalist who documented daily activities at a transport camp.
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Superior work!
- By Anonymous User on 02-24-23
By: Nina Siegal
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A Thousand Naked Strangers
- A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back
- By: Kevin Hazzard
- Narrated by: George Newbern
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In the aftermath of 9/11, Kevin Hazzard felt that something was missing from his life - his days were too safe, too routine. A failed salesman turned local reporter, he wanted to test himself, see how he might respond to pressure and danger. He signed up for emergency medical training and became, at age 26, a newly minted EMT running calls in the worst sections of Atlanta. His life entered a different realm - one of blood, violence, and amazing grace.
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A Wild Ride You Won't Forget!
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By: Kevin Hazzard
What listeners say about Fossil Men
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Daryll Brosanders
- 04-29-21
A reminder of why I don’t work in academia
A very good summary of the search for the fossils of ancient human ancestors during the last 40 years. I would have preferred less time spent on the rivalry between scientists. Instead I was hoping for a deeper dive into the science. The descriptions of the science was sometimes cursory while the political rivalry between labs was described exhaustively.
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- Msrcus/ Houston
- 06-04-23
Bones
In-depth view of the process involved in seeking answers to our origins. Mistakes made/assumptions corrected leading to a greater understanding
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1 person found this helpful
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- Roy Ballard
- 06-15-23
I’m addicted to to learning about our common ancestors
A superb book, beautifully written and I loved every minute. Narrator was wonderful. I loved thinking about my great, great, great ———————-grandmothers. Our early human ancestors are fascinating creatures.
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- Paul
- 01-21-21
Oh narrator
I would wager that Tim White or Owen Lovejoy could not listen to the end of the audio version with a single hair on their heads intact. The slaughter of pronunciation of anatomical and scientific terms was exhausting. Not the narrator (actor) fault. The audiobook publisher should review scientific term pronunciation beforehand with the narrator. Excellent story.
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83 people found this helpful
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Informative investigations of humans’ beginnings
Narration is clear and professional.
Informative and engaging descriptions and explanations of rival theories and evidence of human origin. The controversies based on conflicting interpretations of of archaeological remains is the heart of this analysis and is informative.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Man of Harm
- 12-19-22
Scientific method subject to human emotion
A very compelling story, so well written, character development couldn't have been better, the narrator is a 10, and it is a true story. The scientific discovey of Ardi is profoundly life changing, and that story is eclipsed by the human influence on the scientific method. Science is a flawed human endeavor fraught with ego, jealousy, and ambition. You'll never look at scientific method the same way again. I loved it!
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-07-24
Excellent
The author has combined a depth of research, an ability to explain highly technical information in lay terms and the facility to tell extraordinary story.
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- Chris, Kindle Customer
- 06-09-21
Fossil Men carry on
Riveting. I went to school or studied with many of these men before switching to a lab science 40 years ago. The field was quite male dominated. While not the Double Helix, there is good science here and the competitiveness of research rings true. If you liked Watson's book you will like this.
If you get the audio version download the pdf. And if you do not have an anatomy background, get an anatomy for dummies type book.
The narrator has a good voice, but does not know how to pronounce scientific and Latin derived words. Sometimes his attempt to mimic voices of the principals is awful and misleading.
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2 people found this helpful
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- BostonLady
- 05-06-21
Well done!!
I loved archeology and geology in junior high school. I wished I thought about a career in the field. I don’t have a science background but there was little I didn’t understand and this book. Soooo well done!!
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- Den Ardinger
- 01-28-22
Excellent overview of where the research stands
I enjoyed this book a lot. It had just the right pace to listen to as I drove around town. The narration is excellent and the story well written. If you have an interest in early man, this book is for you. Bravo!
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