FOSSIL MEN

Perhaps once a decade, a journalist recounts the history and latest findings in human evolution, a subject of apparently endless appeal—Martin Meredith’s Born in Africa (2011) remains a page-turner. Pattison caught the bug in 2012 and devoted seven years to gathering material. The result is a satisfying education on the status of the human family tree over the past 5 million years, and the author provides detailed explanations of how anthropologists tease information from bones, teeth, and local geology. It’s a journalistic maxim that readers prefer personalities to events, and Pattison describes plenty of ambitious, media-savvy researchers whose often bitter hostility has stalled progress but makes for lively reading. He passes quickly over the father of African anthropology, the colorful Louis Leakey, spends more time on his wife and family and their pioneering findings, and gives a major role to Donald Johanson, whose 1974 discovery of a partial skeleton of “Lucy,” a small, primitive human ancestor, and the resulting bestselling books made him a familiar name. Mostly Pattison focuses on anatomist Owen Lovejoy and anthropologist Tim White, whose energy, work ethic, and opinions made him a lightning rod for controversy even before his team’s 1994 finding of “Ardi,” a skeleton older than Lucy whose age approaches the era when hominids and chimpanzees diverged from their presumed common ancestor. Colleagues fumed for 15 years as his team studied the bones, and the resulting massive 2009 report aggravated matters. The anthropological community learned that “they were looking up the wrong tree for human origins, and that their quest to link early humanity to modern apes was nullified by Ardi because the last common ancestor looked like no modern species.” Pattison delivers a gripping and reasonably balanced account of the predictably hostile reception, and this remains a controversial interpretation, although it has made some converts.

Big personalities, simmering turmoil, and fascinating popular science.