Lowly origin : where, when, and why our ancestors first stood up
"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."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2003
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, ©2003
xx, 396 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
9780691050867, 9780691120287, 0691050864, 0691120285
49959372
Preface to a self-portrait from the center of the world
On being a primate: from Gondwana to the forests of Egypt
On being an ape: excursions to Asia and back
On being a ground ape: Zanj
On becoming a biped: evolution by basin: domes, rifts, and floodplains
On being a manipulative man-ape: isolation in the south
On the uncertainties of becoming human: main-line, side-line, or parallel humans?
On going far with fire: Africans go abroad
On being a self-made human: the modern Diaspora
In conclusion: confessions of a repentant vandal
Plants known to be especially favored by humans and other primates