A bold new theory on what sparked the "big bang" of human culture The abrupt emergence of human culture over a stunningly short period continues to be one of the great enigmas of human evolution. This compelling book introduces a bold new theory on this unsolved mystery. Author Richard Klein reexamines the archaeological evidence and brings in new discoveries in the study of the human brain. These studies detail the changes that enabled humans to think and behave in far more sophisticated ways than before, resulting in the incredibly rapid evolution of new skills. Richard Klein has been described as "the premier anthropologist in the country today" by Evolutionary Anthropology. Here, he and coauthor Blake Edgar shed new light on the full story of a truly fascinating period of evolution. Richard G. Klein, PhD (Palo Alto, CA), is a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. He is the author of the definitive academic book on the subject of the origins of human culture, The Human Career. Blake Edgar (San Francisco, CA) is the coauthor of the very successful From Lucy to Language, with Dr. Donald Johanson. He has written extensively for Discover, GEO, and numerous other magazines.

Since its publication in 1989, The Human Career has proved to be an indispensable tool in teaching human origins. This substantially revised third edition retains Richard G. Klein's innovative approach while showing how cumulative discoveries and analyses over the past ten years have significantly refined our knowledge of human evolution. Klein chronicles the evolution of people from the earliest primates through the emergence of fully modern humans within the past 200,000 years. His comprehensive treatment stresses recent advances in knowledge, including, for example, ever more abundant evidence that fully modern humans originated in Africa and spread from there, replacing the Neanderthals in Europe and equally archaic people in Asia. With its coverage of both the fossil record and the archaeological record over the 2.5 million years for which both are available, The Human Career demonstrates that human morphology and behavior evolved together. Throughout the book, Klein presents evidence for alternative points of view, but does not hesitate to make his own position clear. In addition to outlining the broad pattern of human evolution, The Human Career details the kinds of data that support it. For the third edition, Klein has added numerous tables and a fresh citation system designed to enhance readability, especially for students. He has also included more than fifty new illustrations to help lay readers grasp the fossils, artifacts, and other discoveries on which specialists rely. With abundant references and hundreds of images, charts, and diagrams, this new edition is unparalleled in its usefulness for teaching human evolution.

"What caused the extinction of so many animals at or near the end of the Pleistocene? Was it overkill by human hunters, the result of a major climatic change or was it just a part of some massive evolutionary turnover? Questions such as these have plagued scientists for over one hundred years and are still being heatedly debated today. Quaternary Extinctions presents the latest and most comprehensive examination of these questions." —Geological Magazine "May be regarded as a kind of standard encyclopedia for Pleistocene vertebrate paleontology for years to come." —American Scientist "Should be read by paleobiologists, biologists, wildlife managers, ecologists, archeologists, and anyone concerned about the ongoing extinction of plants and animals." —Science "Uncommonly readable and varied for watchers of paleontology and the rise of humankind." —Scientific American "Represents a quantum leap in our knowledge of Pleistocene and Holocene palaeobiology. . . . Many volumes on our bookshelves are destined to gather dust rather than attention. But not this one." —Nature "Two strong impressions prevail when first looking into this epic compendium. One is the judicious balance of views that range over the whole continuum between monocausal, cultural, or environmental explanations. The second is that both the data base and theoretical sophistication of the protagonists in the debate have improved by a quantum leap since 1967." —American Anthropologist

In growing numbers, archeologists are specializing in the analysis of excavated animal bones as clues to the environment and behavior of ancient peoples. This pathbreaking work provides a detailed discussion of the outstanding issues and methods of bone studies that will interest zooarcheologists as well as paleontologists who focus on reconstructing ecologies from bones. Because large samples of bones from archeological sites require tedious and time-consuming analysis, the authors also offer a set of computer programs that will greatly simplify the bone specialist's job. After setting forth the interpretive framework that governs their use of numbers in faunal analysis, Richard G. Klein and Kathryn Cruz-Uribe survey various measures of taxonomic abundance, review methods for estimating the sex and age composition of a fossil species sample, and then give examples to show how these measures and sex/age profiles can provide useful information about the past. In the second part of their book, the authors present the computer programs used to calculate and analyze each numerical measure or count discussed in the earlier chapters. These elegant and original programs, written in BASIC, can easily be used by anyone with a microcomputer or with access to large mainframe computers.

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Quando e como teria nascido a cultura humana? O que nos tornou o que somos? O paleoantropólogo Richard Klein e o editor de ciência Blake Edgar desvendam esse mistério, um dos grandes enigmas da evolução do homem. Escrito para não-especialistas, esse relato sobre a evolução da cultura esboça uma história do desenvolvimento do cérebro humano, elaborada a partir da descoberta de pinturas, esculturas e instrumentos primitivos. A hipótese proposta nesse livro é original - a cultura humana teria surgido há 50 mil anos, no continente africano, de onde se expandiu para a Ásia e a Europa. E mais - surgiu de súbito, com o aparecimento de uma notável gama de talentos, quando um novo ramo de primatas evoluídos começou a pintar, inventou instrumentos musicais, criou ornamentos, roupas, apetrechos de caça e pesca, construiu casas e passou a enterrar seus mortos com rituais e cerimônias.

Quando e como teria nascido a cultura humana? O que nos tornou o que somos? O paleoantropólogo Richard Klein e o editor de ciência Blake Edgar desvendam esse mistério, um dos grandes enigmas da nossa evolução. Escrito para não-especialistas, esse relato sobre a evolução da cultura esboça uma história do desenvolvimento do cérebro humano, elaborada a partir da descoberta de pinturas, esculturas e instrumentos primitivos. A hipótese proposta nesse livro é original: a cultura humana teria surgido há 50 mil anos, no continente africano, de onde se expandiu para a Ásia e a Europa. E mais: surgiu de súbito, com o aparecimento de uma notável gama de talentos, quando um novo ramo de primatas evoluídos começou a pintar, inventou instrumentos musicais, criou ornamentos, roupas, apetrechos de caça e pesca, construiu casas e passou a enterrar seus mortos com rituais e cerimônias. Os autores expõem sua pesquisa, selecionando novos indícios, descartando pistas falsas e estudando por que algumas espécies fracassaram na criação do que chamamos cultura. Apoiados também nas recentes descobertas da genética, produzem uma teoria sobre aquilo que teria constituído o momento da "explosão criativa" do homem. Pode estar resolvido assim o mistério acerca das nossas origens, indicando-se também futuros caminhos para as investigações antropológicas.