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Lucy's Legacy: The Quest For Human Origins (2009)

by Donald C. Johanson(Favorite Author)

3.89 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0307396398 (ISBN13: 9780307396396)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Crown

review 1: Overall this was a really good book covering the majority of the important paleoanthropological finds since Lucy's discovery. The book only touches on the discovery of Lucy so if you are looking for a more in depth description of this I would suggest looking elsewhere. This book rather focuses on the other discoveries since than and Lucy's context within them. It is a nice summary of the recent finds in the field with Johanson's opinions on the finds interspersed.With any conflicts he describes between scientists he details both sides of the arguments, showing both of the sides. He also gives his own opinion of the argument. One of the only negatives about the book that I found was the inaccuracy of some of the details but that is only to be expected from a science book. S... morepecifically though, he stated that there is no evidence of modern humans mating with Neandertals when there is evidence now. However when he wrote the book the Neandertal genome had not been sequenced yet and it has been now. There is also a skewing of information from the paleontology side but little information from the genetics field. Overall I found this to be an interesting and informative read that covered most of the recent paleoanthropological finds.
review 2: I am a big fan of Don Johanson's, and of his books Lucy and Lucy's Child. However, this one is very uneven. The first third, with its detailed descriptions of the difficulties of doing fieldwork in Ethiopia, seems like it was written for wholly political reasons that are largely irrelevant to the subject matter (advances in paleoanthropology over the last 35 years). I understand that Dr. Johanson has to maintain a strong relationship with the Ethiopian gov't in order to continue his work, but I wish he could have found a way to do so and still keep the book light, swift-moving, and mass-market appropriate. I blame the ghost writer for that one.(I did, however, get a kick out of all his descriptions of what he ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner -- obviously going back to his field notes for inspiration here.)The summaries of the in-fighting amongst paleoanthropologists, and the summations of various published papers contradicting one another's findings, are also pretty dry for the recreational reader just trying to catch up on the broad strokes. But maybe it's just the era we live in now; dueling academic papers is nowhere near as exciting as dueling cosmologies (as Maitland Edey helps to describe them in the first Lucy book).The good stuff comes in the last third of the book, when a few select competing theories are proposed and examined, and long-standing unsolved mysteries are explored. The chapter on Neanderthal is great, raising all the right questions: Were Neanderthals smarter than we think? Why did they die out? Did they interact with modern Homo sapiens? And possibly interbreed? (The answer: probably not. But it's fun knowing that scientists can't really say for sure.)Another standout chapter -- the one on the Flores "hobbit". I defy anyone to read this and not let their imagination run amok, picturing a 12 inch tall pygmy human hunting giant komodo dragons. According to the book, it's not impossible -- ethnographic and folkloric evidence, including some collected by Darwin, points to the possibility that modern Homo sapiens could have overlapped in time with teeny tiny people (lending some credence to the possibility of trolls...).Bottom line -- the book isn't as skillfully assembled as the first two, but it's still a good overview of the latest discoveries on the Homo family tree. less

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