Narrated very well by Randye Kaye, this book written by a woman who also has a Y in both first and last name, was an excellent study of how fossils become celebrities. It is not about human evolution or the human family tree, so you'll need to read elsewhere for that information. Nevertheless it can be argued that a bit more of the evolutionary side and the linkages (or lack of same) between these fossils would have served well, I feel.
That said I enjoyed it immensely. The book covers these seven fossils (listed here in order of discovery):
- Homo neanderthalensis, specifically the Neanderthal known as La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1, which was discovered in 1908, although the first example of the Neanderthal was discovered in 1856 in the Neander Valley in Germany.
- the Taung Child (Australopithecus africanus), discovered in a quarry in Taung, South Africa in 1924.
- Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis) was discovered starting in 1929 at Zhoukoudian near Beijing.
- Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) was discovered in 1974 at Hadar in Africa. A team at the University of Texas-Austin where the author also has an affiliation, x-rayed Lucy's skeleton and came to the conclusion that she died probably from a fall from a tree, although this is disputed. The author doesn't mention this, so I assume this took place after the book was finalized, the book being published the same year the study was conducted (2016).
- Homo floresiensis, discovered in 2003 at Liang Bua on the island of Flores in Indonesia.
- Australopithecus sediba was discovered in the Malapa Cave in South Africa in 2008.
The story is about how and why these fossils became celebrities, and not necessarily about how important they are to science or how rare they are, or whatever. In that, the book does a good job detailing how they were found and what happened to them since then, including their path to stardom and the reasons for it. I commend this as a worthy read.
