It’s no easy task to write compellingly of the sort of minute. Nevertheless, those interested in human origins should check out this vivid and thorough study. In Fossil Men, Pattison weaves the multiple intrigues of science, politics, and personalities into a masterly structured tale. Though Pattison goes deep on the science, the abundance of detail gets to be a bit much. Pattison doesn’t neglect the academic backlash against this challenge to conventional wisdom (one professor called them “so far wrong as to be laughable”) and makes vivid characters of the Ardi team. Pattison ably combines the adventure yarn with scientific minutiae, tracking the team’s findings, which ultimately refuted the theory that modern apes are close relics of a common human ancestor. Radio New Zealand A riveting story of academic, political, and personal intrigue. Buy on Amazon An epic tale beautifully told. Pattison describes the digs that unearthed Ardi, an ancestor of modern homo sapiens more than a million years older than the more famous Lucy, and captures White and company’s grueling expeditions to Ethiopia, where they had to navigate political tensions to retrieve the fossils and, after nine years, take them abroad for study. Journalist and author of Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind. At the heart of this tale is Tim White, a Berkeley professor with a “monastic devotion to fossils,” who led the team that discovered Ardi in Ethiopia’s Middle Awash region in 1994 and spent 15 years studying the remains. In this lively debut, journalist Pattison digs into the story of Ardi, a 4.4-million-year-old hominid skeleton with profound evolutionary ramifications.
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