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"To be human means to need things. Even more human is to need more and more of them. In this engaging, charming book, archaeologist, curator, and writer Chip Colwell takes us around the world, covering topics as wide-ranging as the dawn of tool making, the earliest cave paintings, the complexities of clothing, the Industrial Revolution, the torrent of gizmos invented to bring us closer and supposedly make our lives easier, and, finally, the mountains of unwanted stuff in dumps. Along the way, he raises questions such as: Why is a treasured keepsake sacred to one person but meaningless to another? What do we go through when we clean out the belongings of the dearly departed? And what is the point of storing things in museums? The book is organized around three historical phases: (1) the invention of tools; (2) the dawn of the belief that things mean something beyond their immediate use (around 50,000 years ago); and (3) the Industrial Revolution and the age of mass consumption. Colwell takes us on a tour across millions of years to explain how humans have arrived at this moment-a world that both requires things and is suffering because of them"--
This volume is motivated by the desire to explain why Neanderthals were replaced by modern humans, in terms of cultural differences between the two (sub-) species. It provides up-to-date coverage on the theory of cultural evolution as is being used by anthropologists, archaeologists, biologists and psychologists to decipher hominin cultural change and diversity during the Palaeolithic. The contributing authors are directly involved in this effort and the material presented includes novel approaches and findings. Chapters explain how learning strategies in combination with social and demographic factors (e.g., population size and mobility patterns) predict cultural evolution in a world without the printing press, television or the Internet. Also addressed is the inverse problem of how learning strategies may be inferred from actual trajectories of cultural change, for example as seen in the North American Palaeolithic. Mathematics and statistics, a sometimes necessary part of theory, are explained in elementary terms where they appear, with details relegated to appendices. Full citations of the relevant literature will help the reader to further pursue any topic of interest.
This volume is a compilation of results from sessions of the Second International Conference on the Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans, which took place between November 30 and December 6, 2014, in Hokkaido, Japan. Similar to the first conference held in 2012 in Tokyo, the 2014 conference (RNMH2014) aimed to compile the results of the latest multidisciplinary approaches investigating the issues surrounding the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans. The results of the sessions, supplemented by off-site contributions, center on the archeology of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic of the Levant and beyond. The first part of this volume presents recent findings from the Levant, wh...
The Archaeology of Large-Scale Manipulation of Prey explores the social and functional aspects of large-scale hunting adaptations in the archaeological record. Mass-kill hunting strategies are ubiquitous in human prehistory and exhibit culturally specific economic, social, environmental, and demographic markers. Here, seven case studies—primarily from the Americas and spanning from the Folsom period on the Great Plains to the ethnographic present in Australia—expand the understanding of large-scale hunting methods beyond the customary role of subsistence and survival to include the social and political realms within which large-scale hunting adaptations evolved. Addressing a diverse asso...
This book sets out some of the latest scientific findings around the evolutionary development of religion and faith and then explores their theological implications. This unique combination of perspectives raises fascinating questions about the characteristics that are considered integral for a flourishing social and religious life and allows us to start to ask where in the evolutionary record they first show up in a distinctly human manner. The book builds a case for connecting theology and evolutionary anthropology using both historical and contemporary sources of knowledge to try and understand the origins of wisdom, humility, and grace in ‘deep time’. In the section on wisdom, the bo...
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Featuring 137 carefully selected cases, this atlas covers virtually every aspect of clinical cross-sectional imaging of the liver, gallbladder, biliary system and pancreas. For the vast majority of the cases, both CT and MR images are included to demonstrate the different features of each lesion. Furthermore, both typical and atypical pathologies are included to facilitate the differential diagnosis in daily clinical practice. Concise yet comprehensive,this atlas includes not only imaging features of the lesions but also the related pathologic and clinical data. It is therefore useful both as a quick guide for practicing radiologists and as a brief textbook for radiologists in training.
Meticulously examining ethnographic sources, Christophe Darmangeat argues that warfare among Australian Aborigines was mostly an extension of their judicial systems. He demonstrates how violent conflict occurred when circumstances prohibited regulated proceedings.
Research in human evolution in Asia has long been thought to lag far behind similar research in Africa and Europe. However, the limited dissemination of findings is often to blame, rather than a lack of scholarship. The Paleoanthropology of Eastern Asia attempts to rectify this misconception by synthesizing research on human evolution in eastern Asia into a single authoritative and definitive text. Covering the span of time from more than two million years ago to the end of the last Ice Age 15,000 years ago, this book examines key events, such as the arrival of the earliest hominins in eastern Asia and the evolution and interaction of various hominin species, including Homo erectus, Homo sap...
Modern Humans is a vivid account of the most recent—and perhaps the most important—phase of human evolution: the appearance of anatomically modern people (Homo sapiens) in Africa less than half a million years ago and their later spread throughout the world. Leaving no stone unturned, John F. Hoffecker demonstrates that Homo sapiens represents a “major transition” in the evolution of living systems in terms of fundamental changes in the role of non-genetic information. Modern Humans synthesizes recent findings from genetics (including the rapidly growing body of ancient DNA), the human fossil record, and archaeology relating to the African origin and global dispersal of anatomically ...