Zusatztext 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. Science Thrilling.... Gibbons [writes] with great flair. Entertainment Weekly An entertaining! richly detailed story! told with clarity and a commanding grasp of the complexities of human origins. The Plain Dealer 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. San Jose Mercury News Informationen zum Autor Ann Gibbons, the primary writer on human evolution for Science 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.com Klappentext 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, The First Human reveals the perils and the promises of fossil hunting on a grand competitive scale. Leseprobe CHAPTER ONE AFRICAN TRAILBLAZERS Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic. -Ernst Mayr, evolutionary biologist I 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." -Louis Leakey, 1966 It 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. This 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 ...

8220;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.”—Science“Thrilling.... Gibbons [writes] with great flair.” —Entertainment Weekly“An entertaining, richly detailed story, told with clarity and a commanding grasp of the complexities of human origins.”—The Plain Dealer“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.”—San Jose Mercury News

Autorentext

Ann Gibbons, the primary writer on human evolution for Science 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.com

Klappentext

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, The First Human reveals the perils and the promises of fossil hunting on a grand competitive scale.

Leseprobe
CHAPTER ONE

AFRICAN TRAILBLAZERS

Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.
-Ernst Mayr, evolutionary biologist

I 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."
-Louis Leakey, 1966

It 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.

This 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 fou…