Books
The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors
Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
A scientist climbs into a four-wheel drive and heads out into the East African desert. Arriving at a likely-looking spot he (or, less often, she) begins scouring the ground. It is really hot. His eye catches something smooth sticking out of the sand. It's a fossilized hominid bone! The researcher's picture appears in Time and National Geographic, alongside an artist's impression of the extinct relative. But many of his colleagues argue with his interpretation of the fossil, how much credit he deserves for finding it, and whether he had any right to be in that spot at all. Bitter arguments ensue, which are resolved to no one's satisfaction. A few years later, another scientist gets into a four-wheel drive. . . .
That's the story of paleoanthropology, at least according to Ann Gibbons's book The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors (Doubleday, $26), a deliciously soap-operatic account of efforts to trace human ancestry through the study of fossils. It's a tale filled with exotic locations, flamboyant characters, and buckets of bad blood. These are driven people, doing arduous work in search of buried treasure; small wonder that things sometimes turn piratical.
