Dragon Bone Hill An Ice-Age Saga of Homo erectus

by Boaz, Noel T.; Ciochon, Russell L.

• ISBN13: 9780195152913
• ISBN10: 0195152913
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-02-16
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

"Peking Man," a cave man once thought a great hunter who had first tamed fire, actually was a composite of the gnawed remains of some fifty women, children, and men unfortunate enough to have been the prey of the giant cave hyena. Researching the famous fossil site of Dragon Bone Hill inChina, scientists Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon retell the story of the cave's unique species of early human, Homo erectus. Boaz and Ciochon take readers on a gripping scientific odyssey. New evidence shows that Homo erectus was an opportunist who rode a tide of environmental change out Africa and into Eurasia, puddle-jumping from one gene pool to the next. Armed with a shaky hold on fire and some sharp rocks,Homo erectus incredibly survived for over 1.5 million years, much longer than our own species Homo sapiens has been on Earth. Tell-tale marks on fossil bones show that the lives of these early humans were brutal, ruled by hunger and who could strike the hardest blow, yet there are fleeting glimpsesof human compassion as well. The small brain of Homo erectus and its strangely unchanging culture indicate that the species could not talk. Part of that primitive culture included ritualized aggression, to which the extremely thick skulls of Homo erectus bear mute witness. Both a vivid recreation of the unimagined way of life of a prehistoric species, so similar yet so unlike us, and a fascinating exposition of how modern multidisciplinary research can test hypotheses in human evolution, Dragon Bone Hill is science writing at its best.

Author Biography

Noel T. Boaz is Professor of Anatomy, Ross University School of Medicine. He is the author of Evolving Health, Eco Homo and Quarry: Closing in on the Missing Link.
Russell L. Ciochon is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. His books include Other Origins: The Search for the Giant Ape in Human Prehistory and The Human Evolution Source Book.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
List of Illustrations	xiii
The Bones of Dragon Hill	1	(32)
The Dragon Reclaims Its Own	33	(22)
Giants and Genes: Changing Views of Peking Man's Evolutionary Significance	55	(19)
The Third Function: A Hypothesis on the Mysterious Skull of Peking Man	74	(16)
The Adaptive Behavior of the Not-Quite-Human	90	(18)
The Times and Climes of Homo erectus	108	(16)
The Nature of Humanness at Longgushan: Brain, Language, Fire, and Cannibalism	124	(18)
Alpha and Omega: Resolving the Ultimate Questions of the Beginnings and Endings of Homo erectus, the Species	142	(19)
Testing the New Hypotheses	161	(20)
Notes	181	(16)
Bibliography	197	(20)
Credits for Illustrations	217	(4)
Index	221