The Neandertals: Changing the Image of Mankind (ACLS Humanities E-Book) - Softcover

Trinkaus, Professor Of Anthropology Erik; Shipman, Adjunct Professor Of Anthropology Pat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597405906 ISBN 13: 9781597405904

Publisher: ACLS History E-Book Project, 2008

Synopsis

In 1856, at the very time when Charles Darwin was writing The Origin of Species, which would popularize the revolutionary concept of evolution worldwide, the fossilized remains of a stocky, powerful, human-like creature were discovered in a German valley called Neandertal. The bones were believed by some scientists to have belonged to a primitive version of modern man. But how old were they? Thus began a controversy that has continued to this day, swirling around the origins and interpretation of the Neandertals, placing them at every possible location on our family tree. Now, Erik Trinkaus, one of the world's leading experts on Neandertals, has collaborated with the noted scientist and writer Pat Shipman on a sweeping and definitive examination of what we know and how we've come to know it. Neandertals, who clearly represent a phase of human evolution, possessed their own unique qualities that made them neither chimpanzee nor modern human. The nature of those qualities - and how Neandertals were discovered, debated, studied, and analyzed over the years - is presented with authority and anecdotal richness. The story ranges from the days of Georges Cuvier (known as "Magician of the Charnel House" for his ability to reconstruct from piles of bones a whole animal skeleton) to the latest researchers whose work with DNA has raised the possibility that we are all descended from one African woman (the "Eve" theory). The controversy carries over from the elite scientific societies of Victorian England and nineteenth-century universities in France and Germany to American laboratories. Along the way there are anthropologists painfully accumulating specimens in digs as distant as Belgium and SouthAfrica, Java and the hills outside Beijing, gradually building up a substantial base for legitimate theorizing (illegitimate, too - the tale of the Piltdown hoax is an enlightening interlude). A contentious, combative saga unfolds of vested interests and accepted wisdom clashing

About this title

From the Inside Flap

To one nineteenth-century scholar, their fierce, ridged brows were evidence of a "moral darkness" that set them irrevocably apart from human beings. Some commentators accused them of cannibalism. Yet by the 1970s the Neandertals were being hailed as "the first flower people" and praised for their apparent compassion and religious piety.
The story of how scientists could come to such divergent conclusions about a set of bones unearthed in Germany in 1856 unfolds with irresistible detail in this enthralling book. Even as The Neandertals assesses the identity, kinship, and character of our possible ancestors, it casts a wry eye on the modern Homo sapiens who have embraced or disavowed them and illuminates the peculiar way in which even science is shaped by human needs and biases.

About the Author

Pat Shipman is retired Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University.

Edition details

• Publisher: ACLS History E-Book Project
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1597405906
• ISBN 13: 9781597405904
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 488