Great Mysteries of Human Evolution

Everything you do has a history. You wake up each morning and get out of bed using an anatomy that allowed your ancestors to stand upright at least 4 million years ago. You go to the kitchen and eat cereal with a bowl and spoon that are part of a toolmaking tradition at least 2.5 million years old. As you munch your cereal, you page through the newspaper, which you can understand thanks to a brain capable of language, abstract thought, and prodigious memory—a brain that has been expanding for 2 million years. Until a few decades ago, most of that evolutionary history was hidden from science's view. But these days hardly a month goes by without news of a significant discovery. Paleoanthropologists keep digging up new fossils of our ancestors, and some of those fossils have even yielded DNA fragments. Meanwhile, geneticists have compiled a veritable encyclopedia of evolution—the ...