Missing Links

"This is a book that I assign to my upper division classes here at Berkeley. It is the best available book on the history of paleoanthropology. It looks at how these finds have been made ever since Darwin. I met John Reader many years ago at a place called Laetoli in Tanzania where Mary Leakey and I were excavating these footprints that were about 3.7 million years old. John was, and still is, a fantastic photographer and a great observer, and he has a sequence of different chapters in his book about the various fieldworks that have gone on. For many years I have been using the book and watching it go out of date because this is a very quickly moving field. So I was really happy when a new edition of Missing Links just came out. This is the second edition, which has a chapter on Ardipithecus at the end of the book that brings the reader right up to date. It is a very nice complement to the previous Gibbons book which shows more how the modern science is done. John presents the history of this field. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In summary, by putting those five books together you have explorers from the early 1800s all the way up to the present. And you can understand the sweep of the science, the history of the science, and all of the different elements that now comprise the investigation of our origins."