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If all people belong to a single closely
related family, how did we acquire our differences and why?
This book provides a radically new explanation. Jonathan
Kingdon suggests that the price our tropical ancestors paid
for their expansion out of an African Eden was an irreversible
dependence on their own technology. It was in the process
of developing man-made economies and adapting to man-modified
habitats, far from Africa, that humans diversified. The
story of their travels and travails is a magnificent adventure.
And Kingdon's argument that the radiation of Modern humans
is largely due to prehistoric ingenuity and mobility demolishes
some widely held notions about the origin of races.
Our earliest ancestors were but a few of
the many animals that had to adapt to fluctuating climates
and see-sawing forests, savannas and deserts. When hominids
invented tools the tropical African mould was broken. Modern
humans are truly 'self-made' -- as Kingdon shows; during
our ascent to dominance every innovation, even the most
strictly biological of adaptations, was profoundly influenced
by its technological context, distinguishing our human evolutionary
path from that of all other animals.
Instead of a single evolutionary line leading
from apes to humans, the author visualises a pagoda-like
tree with four branching storeys, each storey representing
a distinct evolutionary grade. The many varieties of Modern
humans form the most recent, tight little cluster of branchings
at the crown of our family tree.
In pursuing the consequences of his vision,
Kingdon argues that recognising and controlling our opportunistic
nature will be essential to future self-preservation.
Jonathan Kingdon has a lifetime's familiarity
with Africa and its ecology and is an authority on its living
and fossil fauna. His seven-volume atlas of evolution in
Africa, East African Mammals, has been widely acknowledged
as a classic of natural history. His book on the evolution
and biogeography of rare species Island Africa won
the prestigious Sir Peter Kent Book Prize in 1991.
Born and raised in Tanzania he taught
for many years at Makerere, the University of East Africa.
His introduction to prehistory began with recording rock
art in Tanganyika and digging fossils in Uganda followed
by a research fellowship at the Kenya National Museum. Acquaintance
with the Hadza of Tanzania and the Bambuti and Batwa pygmies
of West Uganda provided early introductions to hunter food-gatherer
societies.
His researches into evolution and primate
biology have taken him to many African and Arabian countries
as well as to Australia, America, Europe, Japan, New Guinea
and the Philippines.
His work has been the subject of two
fifty-minute films by the BBC and his art has been exhibited
widely in Africa, Europe, America and Japan.
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