Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness

Front Cover
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999 - Architecture - 258 pages
In Becoming Human, noted anthropologist and renaissance man Ian Tattersall explores what makes us uniquely human, the qualities that set us apart from our ancestors, and the significance of our knowledge. A worldwide tour of discovery, Tattersall takes the reader from 30,000-year-old cave paintings in France and anthropological digs in Africa, to examining human behavior in a New York restaurant. And by offering wisdom gleaned from fossil remains, primate behavior, prehistoric art, and archaeology, Tattersall presents a stunning picture of where humankind evolved, how Darwin's theories have changed, and what we reliably know about modern-day human's capacity for love, language, and thought. Widely praised in the media, and an Amazon.com Top-10 bestseller, Becoming Human is an amazing trip into the past and into the future.
 

Contents

CONTENTS
1
Humans and Apes
30
EvolutionFor What?
78
Starting Out
109
Becoming Human
135
Being Human
188
Postscript
237
Copyright

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About the author (1999)

IAN TATTERSALL is curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, and the author of many books and articles. Becoming Human won the distinguished W.W. Howells Prize of the American Anthropological Association. An expert on both fossil humans and lemurs, Tattersall has done fieldwork in places as varied as Madagascar, Yemen, and Vietnam.