This book is the first comprehensive treatment of all the major human and ape fossils found in China. The book contains original analyses of a number of the fossils, and first-time translations of Chinese-language materials. Metric information is presented, to be used to compare with fossil samples from other parts of the world.

In the 1920s an international team of scientists and miners unearthed the richest evidence of human evolution the world had ever seen: Peking Man. After the communist revolution of 1949, Peking Man became a prominent figure in the movement to bring science to the people. In a new state with twin goals of crushing “superstition” and establishing a socialist society, the story of human evolution was the first lesson in Marxist philosophy offered to the masses. At the same time, even Mao’s populist commitment to mass participation in science failed to account for the power of popular culture—represented most strikingly in legends about the Bigfoot-like Wild Man—to reshape ideas about human nature. The People’s Peking Man is a skilled social history of twentieth-century Chinese paleoanthropology and a compelling cultural—and at times comparative—history of assumptions and debates about what it means to be human. By focusing on issues that push against the boundaries of science and politics, The People’s Peking Man offers an innovative approach to modern Chinese history and the history of science.

For more than a century, scientists have returned time and again to the issue of modern human emergence-the when and where of the evolutionary process and the human behavioral and biological dynamics involved. The 2003 discovery of a human partial skeleton at Tianyuandong (Tianyuan Cave) excited worldwide interest. The first human skeleton from the region to be directly radiocarbon-dated (to 40,000 years before present), its geological age places it close to the time period during which modern humans became permanently established across the Old World (between 50,000 and 35,000 years ago). Through detailed description and interpretation of the most complete early modern human skeleton from eastern Asia, The Early Modern Human from Tianyan Cave, China, addresses long-term questions about the ancestry of modern humans in eastern Asia and the nature of the changes in human behavior with the emergence of modern human biology. This book is a detailed, paleontological and paleobiological presentation of this skeleton, its context, and its implications. By providing basic information for this important human fossil, offering inferences concerning the population processes involved in modern human emergence in eastern Eurasia, and by raising questions concerning the adaptations of these early modern human hunter-gatherers, The Early Modern Human from Tianyuan Cave, China will take its place as a core contribution to the study of modern human emergence.

"Peking Man," a cave man once thought a great hunter who had first tamed fire, actually was a composite of the gnawed remains of some fifty women, children, and men unfortunate enough to have been the prey of the giant cave hyena. Researching the famous fossil site of Dragon Bone Hill in China, scientists Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon retell the story of the cave's unique species of early human, Homo erectus. Boaz and Ciochon take readers on a gripping scientific odyssey. New evidence shows that Homo erectus was an opportunist who rode a tide of environmental change out Africa and into Eurasia, puddle-jumping from one gene pool to the next. Armed with a shaky hold on fire and some sharp rocks, Homo erectus incredibly survived for over 1.5 million years, much longer than our own species Homo sapiens has been on Earth. Tell-tale marks on fossil bones show that the lives of these early humans were brutal, ruled by hunger and who could strike the hardest blow, yet there are fleeting glimpses of human compassion as well. The small brain of Homo erectus and its strangely unchanging culture indicate that the species could not talk. Part of that primitive culture included ritualized aggression, to which the extremely thick skulls of Homo erectus bear mute witness. Both a vivid recreation of the unimagined way of life of a prehistoric species, so similar yet so unlike us, and a fascinating exposition of how modern multidisciplinary research can test hypotheses in human evolution, Dragon Bone Hill is science writing at its best.

This book represents the first comprehensive attempt to bring to western scholarship the great advances made in Paleolithic archaeology and palaeoanthropology in the People’s Republic of China. The 15 chapters are devoted to a historical overview of past and recent studies, the development of chronological frameworks, the composition and stratigraphy of vertebrate fauna, the pongid and hominid palaeontological records, and Pleistocene prehistoric archaeology. Maps, illustrations and tables illustrate the materials presented here.

Exhaustively researched and years in the making, this innovative book documents how the many components of the head function, how they evolved since we diverged from the apes, and how they interact in diverse ways both functionally and developmentally, causing them to be highly integrated. This integration not only permits the head's many units to accommodate each other as they grow and work, but also facilitates evolutionary change. Lieberman shows how, when, and why the major transformations evident in the evolution of the human head occurred. The special way the head is integrated, Lieberman argues, made it possible for a few developmental shifts to have had widespread effects on craniofacial growth, yet still permit the head to function exquisitely. --

Describes the process by which the author uses knowledge of fossil discoveries and comparative ape and human anatomy to create forensically accurate representations of human beings' ancient ancestors.

Seeking to disprove the theory of human evolution, the author examines the fossils of the so-called "ape men."

One of the fundamental questions of our existence is why we are so smart. There are lots of drawbacks to having a large brain, including the huge food intake needed to keep the organ running, the frequency with which it goes wrong, and our very high infant and mother mortality rates compared with other mammals, due to the difficulty of giving birth to offspring with very large heads. So why did evolution favour the brainy ape? This question has been widely debated among biological anthropologists, and in recent years, Maslin and his colleagues have pioneered a new theory that might just be the answer. Looking back to a crucial period some 1.9 million years ago, when brain capacity increased by as much as 80%, The Cradle of Humanity explores the implications of two adaptive responses by our hominin ancestors to rapid climatic changes - big jaws, and big brains. Maslin argues that the impact of changing landscapes and fluctuating climates that led to the appearance of intermittent freshwater lakes in East Africa may have played a key role in human evolution. Alongside the physical evidence of fossils and tools, he considers social theories of why a large, complex brain would have provided a major advantage when trying to survive in the constantly changing East African landscape.

Whether we realize it or not, we carry in our mouths the legacy of our evolution. Our teeth are like living fossils that can be studied and compared to those of our ancestors to teach us how we became human. In Evolution’s Bite, noted paleoanthropologist Peter Ungar brings together for the first time cutting-edge advances in understanding human evolution with new approaches to uncovering dietary clues from fossil teeth. The result is a remarkable investigation into the ways that teeth—their shape, chemistry, and wear—reveal how we came to be. Traveling the four corners of the globe and combining scientific breakthroughs with vivid narrative, Evolution’s Bite presents a unique dental perspective on our astonishing human development.