Seeking the Base of Our Branch

摘要

In The First Human, Ann Gibbons, a contributing correspondent who covers human evolution for Science, offers a wonderful, balanced, and accurate account of the search for the oldest human ancestors and the personages involved in this quest. Gibbons provides a revealing window into the house of horrors that can be human origins research. The descriptions of the protagonists' personalities, which in every case conform to my own perceptions, are insightfully woven into the main fabric of the book: the immensely engaging, and sometimes self-destructive, effort to find the first human.