Fossil Men

September 15, 2020
An entertaining update on a process as "red in tooth and claw" as nature itself. Perhaps once a decade, a journalist recounts the history and latest findings in human evolution, a subject of apparently endless appeal--Martin Meredith's Born in Africa (2011) remains a page-turner. Pattison caught the bug in 2012 and devoted seven years to gathering material. The result is a satisfying education on the status of the human family tree over the past 5 million years, and the author provides detailed explanations of how anthropologists tease information from bones, teeth, and local geology. It's a journalistic maxim that readers prefer personalities to events, and Pattison describes plenty of ambitious, media-savvy researchers whose often bitter hostility has stalled progress but makes for lively reading. He passes quickly over the father of African anthropology, the colorful Louis Leakey, spends more time on his wife and family and their pioneering findings, and gives a major role to Donald Johanson, whose 1974 discovery of a partial skeleton of "Lucy," a small, primitive human ancestor, and the resulting bestselling books made him a familiar name. Mostly Pattison focuses on anatomist Owen Lovejoy and anthropologist Tim White, whose energy, work ethic, and opinions made him a lightning rod for controversy even before his team's 1994 finding of "Ardi," a skeleton older than Lucy whose age approaches the era when hominids and chimpanzees diverged from their presumed common ancestor. Colleagues fumed for 15 years as his team studied the bones, and the resulting massive 2009 report aggravated matters. The anthropological community learned that "they were looking up the wrong tree for human origins, and that their quest to link early humanity to modern apes was nullified by Ardi because the last common ancestor looked like no modern species." Pattison delivers a gripping and reasonably balanced account of the predictably hostile reception, and this remains a controversial interpretation, although it has made some converts. Big personalities, simmering turmoil, and fascinating popular science.

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September 1, 2020

In this debut, journalist Pattison follows the story of abrasive and methodical scientist Tim White's frequent conflict and occasional collaborations with other paleoanthropolologists as his team search out early hominid fossils in Africa. They discover Ardipithecus ramidus, or Ardi, further upstream in the same Ethiopian valley as the Lucy fossil, but 1.2 million years older, and seek clues to understand where she fits into human ancestry. Besides this central scientific adventure, Pattison, who spent time in the field with White's team, explores other issues as well: How much training and authority is given to researchers from the countries where our ancient roots reside? How should we esteem the fieldwork to uncover and document the fossils vs. the theoretical and computer-aided approaches used to interpret them? And what duty do paleontologists have to the scientific community to share their finds and when? Additionally, there are the scientific debates on the relationships between the extant modern ape species (humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas) and when and where their lineages diverged; genetic analyses seem to tell one story that must be brought in line with the physical evidence. VERDICT Compelling science centered on a polarizing personality, this is perfect for National Geographic readers who want to dig deep into the human evolutionary tree.--Wade Lee-Smith, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2020
For a long time, Lucy, a hominid skeleton found in 1974 in the Afar region of Ethiopia, was the oldest human ancestor ever discovered. Then, in 1994, a team of paleontologists working in roughly the same area uncovered a skeleton of a hominin that predates Lucy by a million years (give or take). She was given the designation Ardipithecus ramidus, but she's more commonly known as Ardi; and, although she is not a direct ancestor of humans (she's a new genus, a hitherto-unknown hybrid of arboreal ape and terrestrial biped ), she's opened new windows into the history of human evolution. This is the story of her discovery. Like Matiland and Johanson and Edey's Lucy, it's an exciting book, full of colorful personalities, momentous discoveries, and new ideas that challenge us to reconsider everything we believed about the evolution of humankind. Although the author doesn't shy away from technical terminology, the book isn't written for experts in the field; it's for the lay reader with a healthy interest in the subject. Lucy became a best-seller, and Fossil Men may well follow in its footsteps.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

November 2, 2020
In this lively debut, journalist Pattison digs into the story of Ardi, a 4.4-million-year-old hominid skeleton with profound evolutionary ramifications. At the heart of this tale is Tim White, a Berkeley professor with a “monastic devotion to fossils,” who led the team that discovered Ardi in Ethiopia’s Middle Awash region in 1994 and spent 15 years studying the remains. Pattison describes the digs that unearthed Ardi, an ancestor of modern homo sapiens more than a million years older than the more famous Lucy, and captures White and company’s grueling expeditions to Ethiopia, where they had to navigate political tensions to retrieve the fossils and, after nine years, take them abroad for study. Pattison ably combines the adventure yarn with scientific minutiae, tracking the team’s findings, which ultimately refuted the theory that modern apes are close relics of a common human ancestor. Pattison doesn’t neglect the academic backlash against this challenge to conventional wisdom (one professor called them “so far wrong as to be laughable”) and makes vivid characters of the Ardi team. Though Pattison goes deep on the science, the abundance of detail gets to be a bit much. Nevertheless, those interested in human origins should check out this vivid and thorough study. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House.