Any suggestions for a book on palaeoanthropology?
Tuesday, June 8th, 2004 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manIt'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reasons, I thought it would be nice to get Adam a book on the same subject; but The Making of Mankind is twenty years out of date now, and the field has moved on†.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.
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.
