The Story of Human Evolution.
Why did our earliest ancestors leave the trees and start to walk on two legs? What were early people like? Did they have language? Were they predators of prey? Illustrated with evocative recreations of early man and his landscapes, photographs of the human fossils and palaeontologists who discovered them, and maps of key fossil sites, this book - which accompanies the ground-breaking new ABC television series 'Ape Man' - unravels the clues, the setbacks, the human dramas and the specific disputes to tell the astonishing story of our ancestry.
The book explains, with the help of state-of-the-art graphics, how we developed from apes into what we are today - the most sophisticated animal on the planet. Like the TV series, the book includes the following enthralling and important elements:
- The first "human" footprint left 3.6 million years ago
- A portrait of Homo Erectus, our first true ancestor who lived 1.8 million years ago
- The migration of Homo Erectus out of Africa, to dominate the world
- The radical redrawing of European man's family tree
- DNA evidence of the surprising interbreeding which occurred as the first humans evolved
- The future of human evolution
For the first humans themselves, it is a story of tragedy, brutality, beauty and unrelenting struggle. For the scientists who have followed their four-million-year trial, it is an epic adventure with all the characteristics of the best detective stories, as they have pieced together the sensational truth about our origins.
