The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution
10 best books like The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution (Henry Gee): The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins, Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, Darwin's Origin of the Species: A Biography, The Shadow King: The Bizarre Afterlife of King Tut's Mummy, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, Floods, Famines, And Emperors: El Nino And The Fate Of Civilizations, An Obsession with Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with a Singular Insect
| Author | Thomas Dormandy |
| ISBN | 1852853328 |
This is a history of tuberculosis, including its social, artistic and human impact. Thomas Dormandy's account of the search for the cure is complemented by a description of its complex natural history; portraits of individual sufferers, including writers, artists and musicians, whose lives were...
Fifty thousand years ago—merely a blip in evolutionary time—our Homo sapiens ancestors were competing for existence with several other human species, just as their precursors had done for millions of years. Yet something about our species distinguished it from the pack, and ultimately led...
Over the past 150 years scientists have discovered evidence that at least twenty-seven species of humans evolved on planet Earth. These weren't simply variations on apes, but upright-walking humans who lived side by side, competing, cooperating, sometimes even mating with our direct ancestors....
| Author | Thomas Suddendorf |
| ISBN | 0465030149 |
There exists an undeniable chasm between the capacities of humans and those of animals. Our minds have spawned civilizations and technologies that have changed the face of the Earth, whereas even our closest animal relatives sit unobtrusively in their dwindling habitats. Yet despite longstanding...
Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
| Author | Sarah Blaffer Hrdy |
| ISBN | 0674032993 |
Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands...
Darwin's Origin of the Species: A Biography
| Author | Janet Browne |
| ISBN | 0871139537 |
Charles Darwin’s foremost biographer, Janet Browne, delivers a vivid and accessible introduction to the book that permanently altered our understanding of what it is to be human. A sensation on its publication in 1859, The Origin of the Species profoundly shocked Victorian readers by calling...
The Shadow King: The Bizarre Afterlife of King Tut's Mummy
| Author | Jo Marchant |
| ISBN | 0306821338 |
More than 3,000 years ago, King Tutankhamun’s desiccated body was lovingly wrapped and sent into the future as an immortal god. After resting undisturbed for more than three millennia, King Tut’s mummy was suddenly awakened in 1922. Archaeologist Howard Carter had discovered the boy-king’s...
| Author | Nicholas J. Wade |
| ISBN | 1594204462 |
Drawing on startling new evidence from the human genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story
Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically...
Floods, Famines, And Emperors: El Nino And The Fate Of Civilizations
| Author | Brian M. Fagan |
| ISBN | 0465011217 |
In 1997 and early 1998, one of the most powerful El Niños ever recorded disrupted weather patterns all over the world. Europe suffered through a record freeze as the American West was hit with massive floods and snowstorms; in the western Pacific, meanwhile, some island nations literally went bone...
| Author | Sharman Apt Russell |
| ISBN | 0465071600 |
Butterflies have always served as a metaphor for resurrection and transformation, but as Sharman Apt Russell points out in this lyrical meditation, butterflies are above all objects of obsession. She reveals the logic behind our endless fascination with butterflies and introduces us to the legendary...
| Author | Lucy Moore |
| ISBN | 0156006405 |
Georgian London was a city of extraordinary contrast: its elegance and refinement thrived amid appalling filth and foul smells, decadence and depravity. Crime was everywhere, from pickpockets and prostitutes to murderous highwaymen, as London bulged with riches from its overseas colonies. The...
| Author | Rick Wartzman |
| ISBN | 1586483315 |
Few books have caused as big a stir as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, when it was published in April 1939. By May, it was the nation’s number one bestseller, but in Kern County, California—the Joads’ newfound home—the book was burned publicly and banned from library shelves. Obscene...
| Author | Mark S. Blumberg |
| ISBN | 0195322827 |
In most respects, Abigail and Brittany Hensel are normal American twins. Born and raised in a small town, they enjoy a close relationship, though each has her own tastes and personality. But the Hensels also share a body. Their two heads sit side-by-side on a single torso, with two arms and two legs. They...
A Natural History of Human Thinking
| Author | Michael Tomasello |
| ISBN | 0674724771 |
Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great...
| Author | Carl Zimmer |
| ISBN | 0981519474 |
The Tangled Bank is the first textbook about evolution intended for the general reader. Zimmer, an award-winning science writer, takes readers on a fascinating journey into the latest discoveries about evolution. In the Canadian Arctic, paleontologists unearth fossils documenting the move of...
Fossils: A Very Short Introduction
| Author | Keith S. Thomson |
| ISBN | 0192805045 |
Fossils have been vital to our understanding of the formation of the earth and the origins of life. However, their impact has not been limited to debates about geology and evolution: attempts to explain their existence has shaken religion at its very roots, and they have remained a subject of ceaseless...
| Author | Peter D. Ward |
| ISBN | 0465009492 |
Sea level rise will happen no matter what we do. Even if we stopped all carbon dioxide emissions today, the seas would rise one meter by 2050 and three meters by 2100. This--not drought, species extinction, or excessive heat waves--will be the most catastrophic effect of global warming. And it won't...
| Author | Peter J. Richerson |
| ISBN | 0226712125 |
Humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. While we are similar to other mammals in many ways, our behavior sets us apart. Our unparalleled ability to adapt has allowed us to occupy virtually every habitat on earth using an incredible variety of tools and subsistence techniques. Our societies...
| Author | Pat Shipman |
| ISBN | 0674736761 |
With their large brains, sturdy physique, sophisticated tools, and hunting skills, Neanderthals are the closest known relatives to humans. Approximately 200,000 years ago, as modern humans began to radiate out from their evolutionary birthplace in Africa, Neanderthals were already thriving...
The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People
| Author | Neil Shubin |
| ISBN | 0307378438 |
**Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)**
From one of our finest and most popular science writers, and the best-selling author of Your Inner Fish, comes the answer to a scientific mystery as big as the world itself: How are the events that formed our solar system billions of years ago embedded...
| Author | William Souder |
| ISBN | 0865477264 |
"Truly wonderful . . . Excellent work."--Tim Flannery, The New York Review of Books
In the century and a half since Audubon's death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was--or the dramatic story behind...
| Author | Azar Gat |
| ISBN | 0199262136 |
In this truly global study, major military historian Azar Gat sets out to unravel the "riddle of war" throughout human history, from the early hunter-gatherers right through to the unconventional terrorism of the twenty-first century. In the process, the book generates an astonishing wealth of...
| Author | Norman Stone |
| ISBN | 0500290385 |
A virtuoso performance by historian Norman Stone, who has lived and worked in the country since 1997, this concise survey of Turkeys relations with its immediate neighbours and the wider world from the 11th century to the present day. Stone deftly conducts the reader through this story, from the arrival...
| Author | Sean B. Carroll |
| ISBN | 0691167427 |
How does life work? How does nature produce the right numbers of zebras and lions on the African savanna, or fish in the ocean? How do our bodies produce the right numbers of cells in our organs and bloodstream? In "The Serengeti Rules," award-winning biologist and author Sean Carroll tells the stories...
