In The Improbable Primate, Clive Finlayson gives a provocative view of human evolution, arguing that the critical factor that shaped us was water. Questioning current accounts of tools and our spread from Africa, he presents an ecological viewpoint.

Throughout the world, closely related species are found on landmasses separated by wide stretches of ocean. What explains these far-flung distributions? Why are such species found where they are across the Earth? Since the discovery of plate tectonics, scientists have conjectured that plants and animals were scattered over the globe by riding pieces of ancient supercontinents as they broke up. In the past decade, however, that theory has foundered, as the genomic revolution has made reams of new data available. And the data has revealed an extraordinary, stranger-than-fiction story that has sparked a scientific upheaval. In The Monkey's Voyage, biologist Alan de Queiroz describes the radical new view of how fragmented distributions came into being: frogs and mammals rode on rafts and icebergs, tiny spiders drifted on storm winds, and plant seeds were carried in the plumage of sea-going birds to create the map of life we see today. In other words, these organisms were not simply constrained by continental fate; they were the makers of their own geographic destiny. And as de Queiroz shows, the effects of oceanic dispersal have been crucial in generating the diversity of life on Earth, from monkeys and guinea pigs in South America to beech trees and kiwi birds in New Zealand. By toppling the idea that the slow process of continental drift is the main force behind the odd distributions of organisms, this theory highlights the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the history of life. In the tradition of John McPhee's Basin and Range, The Monkey's Voyage is a beautifully told narrative that strikingly reveals the importance of contingency in history and the nature of scientific discovery.

Diet 123: A Computerized Dietary Analysis Program Using Lotus 123TM - Nicolette I. Teufel and George J. Teufel The Cultural Ecology of Hunting and Potlatches Among the Lillooet Indians - Steven Romanoff Abstracts of Papers, 40th Annual Northwest Anthropological Conference Jargonization Before Chinook Jargon - William J. Samarin Improbable Species, Deceit, and Social Control in the Context of Behavioral Ecology - Richard Beeson Protecting American Indian Sacred Geography - Deward E. Walker, Jr.

Ten mystery primates put themselves out there in this book. They show their most flattering and unflattering features. For example, one points out its pretty red hair while another one calls attention to its big nose. Each primate hopes to be known by young readers.

One of the fundamental questions of our existence is why we are so smart. There are lots of drawbacks to having a large brain, including the huge food intake needed to keep the organ running, the frequency with which it goes wrong, and our very high infant and mother mortality rates compared with other mammals, due to the difficulty of giving birth to offspring with very large heads. So why did evolution favour the brainy ape? This question has been widely debated among biological anthropologists, and in recent years, Maslin and his colleagues have pioneered a new theory that might just be the answer. Looking back to a crucial period some 1.9 million years ago, when brain capacity increased by as much as 80%, The Cradle of Humanity explores the implications of two adaptive responses by our hominin ancestors to rapid climatic changes - big jaws, and big brains. Maslin argues that the impact of changing landscapes and fluctuating climates that led to the appearance of intermittent freshwater lakes in East Africa may have played a key role in human evolution. Alongside the physical evidence of fossils and tools, he considers social theories of why a large, complex brain would have provided a major advantage when trying to survive in the constantly changing East African landscape.

Our closest living relatives are the chimpanzee and bonobo. We share many characteristics with them, but our lineages diverged millions of years ago. Who in fact was our last common ancestor? Bringing together ecology, evolution, genetics, anatomy and geology, this book provides a new perspective on human evolution. What can fossil apes tell us about the origins of human evolution? Did the last common ancestor of apes and humans live in trees or on the ground? What did it eat, and how did it survive in a world full of large predators? Did it look anything like living apes? Andrews addresses these questions and more to reconstruct the common ancestor and its habitat. Synthesising thirty-five years of work on both ancient environments and fossil and modern ape anatomy, this book provides unique new insights into the evolutionary processes that led to the origins of the human lineage.

Following Russia's aggressive war in Ukraine, the world is suddenly gripped by concerns over energy security. And yet, there is an even greater threat ahead – one that is much more likely to shape the events of the twenty-first century than the competition for oil or gas. The combination of an ever-increasing global population, climate change, industrialisation, urbanisation and limited natural resources means that one difficulty, above all, will shape the political, economic and security environment in the years ahead: that is water. If people and nations will fight for fossil fuels, it is nothing compared to what they will do for the most vital natural resource of all. As both a citizen who has supported water charities and worked in the NHS and a politician who has dealt with security and economic issues, Liam Fox tells the story of water and the problems it presents in a more complete way than ever before. The Coming Storm unites a range of concerns that are often written about separately but seldom together and provides a comprehensible and compelling call for urgent action.