Eco homo : how the human being emerged from the cataclysmic history of the earth
著者
書誌事項
Eco homo : how the human being emerged from the cataclysmic history of the earth
BasicBooks, c1997
- hbk
- pbk
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注記
Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-272) and index
内容説明・目次
- 巻冊次
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hbk ISBN 9780465018031
内容説明
This volume argues that the ecological and environmental changes that may have occurred at the same time may have been the vital cause of the evolution from ape to modern human. It offers theories as how the evolution of the gorilla may be tied to a long period of global cooling; how the drying up of the Mediterranean may have decreased the salinity of the northern Atlantic, lowering its freezing point and culminating in the Ice Age; and how waves of climatic aridity led to the formation of the deserts and may have been responsible for pushing hominids out of Africa, not once but several times. The book aims to shed new light on humankind's irrevocable ties to its environment.
- 巻冊次
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pbk ISBN 9780465018048
内容説明
Did you ever wonder why people walk upright? Why we have such big brains? Why some people have dark skin and some have light? Why our early ancestors ever left Africa and started wandering over the globe? And perhaps even why we, with all our technological sophistication, still like to barbecue raw meat over an open fire? This book is about the immense forces of nature that formed and shaped the human species over millions of years. It is also about the new high-tech science that has allowed us to peer into the dark recesses of the past as never before and to reconstruct the trials, adaptive successes, and evolution of our ancestors. In Eco Homo , paleoanthroplogist Noel T. Boaz presents a narrative of human evolution, a natural history of our origins, in the contexts of ecology and environmental change. Did you ever wonder why people walk upright? Why we have such big brains? Why s ome people have dark skin and some have light? Why our early ancestors ever left Africa and started wandering over the globe? And perhaps even why we, with all our technological sophistication, still like to barbecue raw meat over an open fire?
This book is about the immense forces of nature that formed and shaped the human species over millions of years. It is also about the new high-tech science that has allowed us to peer into the dark recesses of the past as never before and to reconstruct the trials, adaptive successes, and evolution of our ancestors. In Eco Homo , paleoanthroplogist Noel T. Boaz presents a narrative of human evolution, a natural history of our origins, in the contexts of ecology and environmental change. Our story begins with the appearance of higher primates in the Old World tropics. We then narrow our focus to Africa and examine eight hypotheses that explain the major evolutionary divergences of the gorilla, the chimpanzee, and finally human ancestors, or hominids. The events in this evolution only make sense from a standpoint of the adaptations that our ancestors made to changing environments, different geography, and fluctuating climates. Ecological change, characterized by increasingly severe environmental fluctuations of greater and greater amplitude during the late Pleistocene period, forced the evolution of culture as we know it.
Culture in the hands of the first agriculturists 10,000 years ago increased population densities, created diseases unknown to earlier hominids, built the first villages and temples, and gave humans the pervasive misconception that they were above the laws of nature, even as they rushed headlong into a despoilment of their habitat unknown in any other species. The message of Eco Homo for the ecological future of the species is that we cannot escape nature. If we attempt to do soto step outside the bounds of our basic biological adaptationswe suffer the consequences. Culture needs to be brought under control and to be made to serve human adaptation, not vice versa. If we can tame runaway culture, we may be able to regain a measure of the ancestral equilibrium between our adaptations and a sustainable environment.
目次
- Introduction
- Ecological Changes and Primate Evolution: The Prime Movers of Change
- Hypothesis 1: The Earth cools and the Gorilla Evolves in Montane Isolation
- Hypothesis 2: the African Western Rift Valley Split Human Ancestors Off from Chimps
- Hypothesis 3: The Developing Sahara Split Hominids Off from Chimps
- Hypothesis 4: Austalopithecines Adapt to an Expanding Savanna-Grassland Environment
- Hypothesis 5: The 2.8-Million-Year-Old Paleoclimatic Event Effects the Evolutionary Origin of the Genus Homo
- Hypothesis 6: A Paleoclimatic Pump Expels Homo Erectus out of Africa
- Hypothesis 7: Neandertals and Mitochondrial Eve Dance a Pas de Deux to the Rhythm of Climate Change
- Hypothesis 8: Superorganic Culture Allows Modern Humans to Conquer the Ice Age and the New World
- Implications: Future Human Evolution, Overpopulation, Global Warming, Pollution, and Our Ecological Survival.
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