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Some fifty thousand years ago Homo sapiens,
the newest branch of a long and varied tree of evolved apes,
suddenly developed a remarkable range of new talents. These
people -- whose primitive stone culture had previously been
little different from that of their ancestors -- began painting.
They invented music and the instruments to play it. They
fashioned jewelry and clothing, created fishing poles and
tackle as well as bows and arrows, constructed the oldest
substantial houses, and buried their dead with ritual and
ceremony. This creative explosion, occurring over such a
remarkably short period, has been called the "big bang"
of human culture.
It was the fourth in a series of punctuated
events that have marked the history of human evolution.
The first occurred between seven and five million years
ago when a group of African apes, in response to shrinking
forests and expanding open savannas, began to walk upright.
These are the bipedal apes of which Lucy and her kin are
the most famous. The next occurred about two and a half
million years ago, again during a time of global climatic
change resulting in major environmental disruption, when
the first stone-tool makers emerged. The third occurred
about 1.8 million years ago when humans developed modern
body proportions and colonized largely treeless environments
for the first time.
So what accelerated our cultural development?
What made us who we are?
Now, for the first time, preeminent anthropologist
Richard Klein tackles this mystery, one of the great enigmas
of our evolution. With Blake Edgar, he works his way forward
through time as Homo developed, looking for clues,
discarding false leads, and examining why other species
of man such as Neanderthals failed to develop a similar
culture -- and failed to survive. He reexamines the archeological
evidence, including the latest findings, and considers new
discoveries in the study of human genetics. This journey
leads him to a bold new theory involving the brain that
could solve the mystery of our origins and that points the
way for future studies.
Richard G. Klein, Ph.D., is Professor
of Anthropology at Stanford University. He is the author
of the definitive scholarly book on human evolution, The
Human Career.
Blake Edgar is a science editor at the
University of California Press and the coauthor with Donald
Johanson of From Lucy to Language.
He has written for Discover,
Scientific American,
GEO,
and numerous other magazines.
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