The Improbable Primate: How Water Shaped Human Evolution Hardcover – May 6, 2014 Author: Clive Finlayson | Language: English | ISBN:
019965879X | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Improbable Primate: How Water Shaped Human Evolution – May 6, 2014 You can download The Improbable Primate: How Water Shaped Human Evolution Hardcover – May 6, 2014 from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
Review
"Did water make people human? Mr Finlayson certainly makes a convincing case." -- The Economist
About the Author
Clive Finlayson is a noted expert on the Neanderthals and has been researching their final stand in Gibraltar. He is Director of the Gibraltar Museum and Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto, having trained in Oxford as an evolutionary ecologist. His previous books include Neanderthals and Modern Humans: An Ecological and Evolutinary Perspective and The Humans Who Went Extinct.
Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation The Improbable Primate: How Water Shaped Human Evolution – May 6, 2014
- Hardcover: 232 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press (May 6, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 019965879X
- ISBN-13: 978-0199658794
- Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #109,406 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #21 in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Civil & Environmental > Environmental > Water Quality & Treatment
- #38 in Books > History > Historical Study & Educational Resources > Historical Geography
This very short book (ca. 60,000 words of text) argues that humans are fond of water, and naturally gravitate to and flourish best in environments with a lot of water--more specifically, in landscapes of "trees/open-spaces/water." There are many reasons to argue for this. The distribution of human fossils is the most clear and direct: from Australopithecines on, they are in riparian and lake and shore environments. This, however, is partially a reflection of where fossilization is likely to happen, i.e. in places where alluvium covers dead bodies fairly quickly. But there is more: the human ability to cool by copious sweating, and thus our enormous requirement for drinking water in hot climates; our hairlessness (partly because of the sweating); our need to bathe a lot, again because of the sweating--without bathing we are prone to skin diseases; and, perhaps most important, our need for large amounts of high-nutrient food, to run our big bodies and big brains. (The human nervous system requires 400 calories a day--as much as a big dog needs). So, though not really "aquatic apes," we need a lot of water. Our fondness for a mosaic of trees and open spaces is related to that high food need. Ecological edges have lots of food.
Dr. Finlayson could have done a good deal more with this. He points out we are "rain-chasers, but only in the broad sense that we need a fairly well-watered environment. Adoph Portmann pointed out 50 years ago that we are literal rain-chasers (and Finlayson makes that point for modern Australian aborigines): we go to where rain has fallen, because there is more food there. Dr. Finlayson also briefly mentions fire, but only as an opener-up of forest.
The Improbable Primate: How Water Shaped Human Evolution – May 6, 2014 Download
Please Wait...