Lucy's Child: The Discovery of a Human Ancestor [FIRST EDTION, FIRST PRINTING]

Johanson, Donald; Shreeve, James

Published by William Morrow and Company, New York, 1989

About this Item

Fine condition brown boards, brown cloth spine, and silver spine lettering contained in a near fine condition non price-clipped color illustrated dust jacket. Includes List of Other Books by Donald Johanson and James Shreeve; Authors' Dedications; Acknowledgments; Epilogue; Bibliography and Index. Illustrated with a section of color photographic plates, additional black-and-white photographs interspersed throughout the volume, Preliminary Page map and timeline; and illustrated front and rear endpapers. A two inch scratch mark at the jacket front (difficult to see in the picture); the jacket is otherwise in as new condition (see photographs). "Lucy's Child is the story of a discovery. In July 1986, Donald Johanson, who forced a major reinterpretation of the early stages of human evolution by finding the famous Lucy skeleton, returns to search for fossils in Africa for the first time in a decade. His destination is Olduvai Gorge, a dusty ravine in Tanzania first put on the paleoanthropological map by Louis and Mary Leakey. Many of Johanson's colleagues war Johanson that Olduvai's trove of fossils has long since been exhausted. But he is not in a postion to turn the invitation down. Since the late 1970s, the government of Ethiopia has virtually closed off the phenomenally rich fossil beds within its borders where Lucy was found. Meanwhile, Johanson and his brilliant, prickly colleague Tim White have become personae non gratae with Mary Leakey and her son Richard, who controls access to all digging sites in nearby Kenya. Olduvai, exhausted or not, may be the last hope left for Johanson. Only three days after establishing camp, something wildly, almost absurdly fortuitous occurs. In the late afternoon, the survey team led by Johanson and White finds a piece of a two-million-year-old elbow lying on a gentle slope beside the main road throough the Gorge. Next, a stretch of upper jawbone turns up, giving irrefutable evidence that the specimen is indeed a hominid - a member of the human ancestral family. Lucy's Child is the firsthand account of a discovery that generates some surprising new insights into our beginnings. But the book is also the story of a science coming of age, synthesizing for a popular audience a new kind of paleoanthropology that has been emerging over the last few years. The science is no less charged by ego and rivalry, but its practitioners have begun to apply the rigorous self-questioning methods and probing of hard evidence that yield real knowledge about our origins. The book asks the same questions that have puzzled scientists since Darwin: What made us human? When did we first walk upright? Why did we develop such astonishing mental powers? How different are we from the rest of creation? But it approaches these questions from a variety of new directions, incorporating techniques borrowed from molecular biology, new methodologies in archeological excavation, sociobiological studies of primates and hunter-gatherer societies, and new insights into the relationship of ancient man to his environment. The idea for Lucy's Child arose when Donald Johanson saw his return to Africa as a way of framing a discussion of the progress made in human-origins research since the publication of his best seller, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, in 1981. What he did not foresee was the discovery of a new hominid skeleton - doubly fortunate for the book, since the find was made while science writer James Shreeve was at Olduvai interviewing scientists and collection impressions. Lucy's Child should appeal to anyone with an interest in the mysteries of the deep human past." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.

Seller Inventory # 008446

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Lucy's Child: The Discovery of a Human Ancestor [FIRST EDTION, FIRST PRINTING]
• Publisher: William Morrow and Company, New York
• Publication Date: 1989
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Bacon, Paul (jacket design); Matternes, Jay (jacket illustration)
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine