". . . modern humans are still cave men in the sense that our habitations and companion species are the very ones that we formed functional relationships with more than a million years ago. In the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, David Quammen, Ian Tattersall, and Wade Davis, five Canadian scientists compare the modern high-rise towers of our urban landscape to the cave and cliffside dwellings of our ancient ancestors and conclude that the construction of our sophisticated habitats owes much to the "cave men" and "cave women" of our past. With implications in fields as diverse as architecture, agriculture and even aspects of the origins of art, the authors of this compelling and sometimes controversial work challenge conventional thinking on separate topics such as evolution, history and ecology, by suggesting a single premise that binds these ideas together - that cliffs and rock outcrops have played a vital role in the origin, evolution, and development of the entire human habitat - that the ecological similarities between ancestral human habitats and modern ones over a period of at least one million years provide a brand new perspective on what it means to be human.

An ancient cedar forest exists on the Niagara Escarpment in a highly populated area. This full-colour book reveals the vital importance of this ecosystem to our natural heritage.

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.

How do plants, animals, and humans manage to survive and adapt to the urban environment? This book provides a comprehensive coverage of biological matters related to urban environments presenting both the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings, and practical examples required to understand and address the challenges presented by this novel environment. The Biology of Urban Environments focusses on urban denizens: species (both domesticated and non-domesticated) that live for all or part of their life cycle in towns and cities. The biology of household plants and companion animals is discussed alongside that of species that have become feral or have not been domesticated. Temporal and spatial distribution patterns are set out and generalizations are made while exceptions are also discussed. The various strategies used and the genotypic, phenotypic, and behavioural adaptions of plants and animals in the face of the challenges presented by urban environments are explained. The final two chapters contain a discussion of the impacts of urban environments on human biology and suggestions on how this understanding might be used to address the increasing human health burden associated with illnesses that are characteristic of urbanites in the early twenty-first century.

You are missing at least eighty percent of what is happening around you right now. You are missing what is happening in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. In marshalling your attention to these words, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses. This ignorance is useful: indeed, we compliment it and call it concentration. It enables us to not just notice the shapes on the page, but to absorb them as intelligible words, phrases, ideas. Alas, we tend to bring this focus to every activity we do. In so doing, it is inevitable that we also bring along attention's companion: inattention to everything else. This book begins with that inattention. It is not a book about how to bring more focus to your reading of Tolstoy; it is not about how to multitask, attending to two or three or four tasks at once. It is not about how to avoid falling asleep at a public lecture, or at your grandfather's tales of boyhood misadventures. It is about attending to the joys of the unattended, the perceived 'ordinary'. Even when engaged in the simplest of activities - taking a walk around the block - we pay so little attention to most of what is right before us that we are sleepwalkers in our own lives. This book is about that walk around the block, and how to rediscover the extraordinary things that we are missing in our ordinary activities.

With over half of the global human population living in urban regions, urban ecosystems may now represent the contemporary and future human environment. This book aims to review what is currently known about urban ecosystems in a short and approachable text that will serve as a key resource for teaching and learning related to the urban environment.