Any suggestions for a book on palaeoanthropology?

[lethargic_man]

It's my cousin Adam's barmitzvah in two weeks, and I've been thinking about what to get him. I've already got him an item of Judaica, but I thought it would be nice to get him something else as well.

For my barmitzvah someone gave me a copy of The Making of Mankind by the palaeoanthropologist Richard Leakey (son of the Louis and Mary Leakey who found many of the fossils outlining man's ancestry in the sixties). I found the book fascinating; it was a subject I knew little about beforehand.

Many years later, after encountering creationists and other Biblical literalists, that I realised there was a second message conveyed in giving me a book on man's evolution for my entry into religious manhood. (Largely a symbolic one, in my case; I was not in need of educating out of a creationist worldview at the time^*, and neither is Adam.)

For these reasons, I thought it would be nice to get Adam a book on the same subject; but The Making of Mankind is twenty years out of date now, and the field has moved on^†. Does anyone have any suggestions for a good book on palaeoanthropology suitable for a thirteen-year-old boy?

* At primary school, when my mishugge-frum Hebrew teacher told us Noach took all the animals there ever were onto the Ark, I asked whether he took the dinosaurs. "Well, what do you think?" she asked scornfully, and, cowed, I shut up. To this day I don't know what her answer to my question would have been.

† With such discoveries as Kenyanthropus platyops and Ororin turgenensis, for example, filling in what was described as a fossil black hole in the Leakey book.

Comments

[rowan-leigh.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest Timewalkers by Clive Gamble, and In Search of the Neanderthals by Clive Gamble and Chris Stringer, certainly for an intelligent thirteen year old. I read them for the first time just under seven years ago, however, so they're getting on a bit. In Search of the Neanderthals is less weighty than Timewalkers, so might be better suited to your cousin. Although I can heartily recommend both of them as books, I can't say for certain that I'd give either of them to a thirteen-year-old, so please don't buy either of them without having a good look at them first.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the suggestions. Whilst in Waterstones in Oxfnord last Friday with livredor, blackherring and possibly darcydodo, I had a look around but couldn't see anything which grabbed me. I tried again in the Borders on Charing Cross Road in London on Wednesday, with equal success. There were lots of books aimed at serious scientists, and populist overviews of evolution as a whole, and a few non-illustrated paperbacks about human evolution, but the only book well-illustrated with glossy colour pictures and written for the layman as my book was, was Walking With Cavemen, the book of the BBC series; and I did not want to get a book which didn't so much blur the line between science and docudrama as fail to draw it at all for a thirteen year old, who obviously has not yet amassed sufficient experience to enable him to make that judgment on his own.

I tried asking the shop attendant, and she was completely useless. Since time was running out, I decided to go for something else that touched on the subject, and hopefully would stimulate Adam's interest in science and similar subjects in the way I wanted, and, with a stroke of lateral-thinking genius, selected and bought a copy of The Science of Discworld.