A. africanus
A01=Jonathan Kingdon
Adaptation
Aegyptopithecus
Anatomy
Ardipithecus ramidus
Arid
Australopithecine
Australopithecus
Australopithecus afarensis
Australopithecus africanus
Author_Jonathan Kingdon
Baboon
Bipedalism
Carnivore
Category=PSAJ
Category=PSXE
Central Africa
Charles Darwin
Chimpanzee
Climate change
Competition
East Africa
Ecological island
Ecology
Ecosystem
Emergence
Endemism
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
Evolution
Female
Foraging
Forelimb
Gene flow
Gene pool
Hominidae
Hominini
Homo
Homo erectus
Homo ergaster
Homo habilis
Homo sapiens
Human evolution
Invertebrate
Jaw
Kenyanthropus
Laetoli
Lake Turkana
Louis Leakey
Mammal
Miocene
Neanderthal
Orangutan
Organism
Paleontology
Paranthropus
Physiology
Population bottleneck
Praeanthropus
Predation
Richard Dawkins
Richard Leakey
Rift valley
Rodent
Southern Africa
Speciation
Stone tool
Swartkrans
Technology
Thicket
Tim Flannery
Tooth
Tropical Africa
Vertebrate
Vestigiality
Product details
- ISBN 9780691120287
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 04 Oct 2004
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Our ability to walk on two legs is not only a characteristic human trait but one of the things that made us human in the first place. Once our ancestors could walk on two legs, they began to do many of the things that apes cannot do: cross wide open spaces, manipulate complex tools, communicate with new signal systems, and light fires. Titled after the last two words of Darwin's Descent of Man and written by a leading scholar of human evolution, Lowly Origin is the first book to explain the sources and consequences of bipedalism to a broad audience. Along the way, it accounts for recent fossil discoveries that show us a still incomplete but much bushier family tree than most of us learned about in school. Jonathan Kingdon uses the very latest findings from ecology, biogeography, and paleontology to build a new and up-to-date account of how four-legged apes became two-legged hominins. He describes what it took to get up onto two legs as well as the protracted consequences of that step--some of which led straight to modern humans and others to very different bipeds.
This allows him to make sense of recently unearthed evidence suggesting that no fewer than twenty species of humans and hominins have lived and become extinct. Following the evolution of two-legged creatures from our earliest lowly forebears to the present, Kingdon concludes with future options for the last surviving biped. A major new narrative of human evolution, Lowly Origin is the best available account of what it meant--and what it means--to walk on two feet.
Jonathan Kingdon is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Biological Anthropology and Department of Zoology of Oxford University. He is the author of and artist for numerous books, including "Self-Made Man" and "Island Africa" (Princeton). The Millennium issue of "American Scientist" named Kingdon's "Atlas of Evolution in Africa" one of the "100 books that shaped a century of science."
