Almost human

The astonishing tale of Homo naledi

Lee Berger (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

256 Seiten

2017
Jonathan Ball Publishers SA (Verlag)
9781868428052 (ISBN)

Titel nicht im Sortiment

Artikel merken

Almost Human is the personal story of a charismatic and visionary palaeontologist, a rich and readable narrative about science, exploration, and what it means to be human. In 2013, Lee Berger caught wind of a cache of bones in a hard-to-reach underground cave near Johannesburg. He put out a call around the world for collaborators - men and women small and adventurous enough to be able to squeeze through 8-inch tunnels to reach a sunless cave 40 feet underground. With this team of 'underground astronauts', Berger made the discovery of a lifetime: hundreds of prehistoric bones, including entire skeletons of at least 15 individuals, all perhaps two million years old. Their features combined those of known pre-hominids with those more human than anything ever before seen in prehistoric remains. Berger's team had discovered an all new species: Homo naledi. The cave proved to be the richest pre-hominid site ever discovered, full of implications that challenge how we define ourselves as human. Did these ancestors of ours bury their dead? If so, they must have had an awareness of death, a level of self-knowledge: the very characteristic we used to define ourselves as human.
Did an equally advanced species inhabit Earth with us, or before us? Addressing these questions, Berger counters the arguments of those colleagues who have questioned his controversial interpretations and astounding finds.

Lee Berger is Research Professor in Human Origins and the Public Understanding of Science at Wits University and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. Berger is the author of more than 200 scholarly and popular works. His research has been featured three times on the cover of Science and has been named among the top 100 science stories of the year by Time, Scientific American and Discover magazine on numerous occasions. Berger has appeared in many television documentaries and widely on television and radio, including NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Erscheinungsdatum	09.04.2017
Verlagsort	Johannesburg
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 233 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Archäologie
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
	Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Evolution
	Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Mineralogie / Paläontologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-13	9781868428052 / 9781868428052
Zustand	Neuware