Children of the Ice Age: How a Global Catastrophe Allowed Humans to Evolve

Description

Author: Stanley, Steven M.  (1941-)

Publisher: Harmony Books

Pub Date: 1996

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Book: Fair.  Binding tight.  No tears, bends or folds.  Highlighting throughout.  Light edge and corner wear.  Dust Jacket: Fair to Good.  NOT price clipped.  Smudges on front and rear cover from half-binding of the book.  Light edge and corner wear.

Notes: Three mysteries: Bipedalism, big brains, evolutionary change.  Stanley argues that human infants required large amounts of care (duh!), and that our tree dwelling ancestors couldn’t care for these infants by partially staying in trees, and thus evolving into ground dwellers, evolving both big brains and bidpedalism.  Environmental change?  Stanley postulates that the geological rise of the Isthmus of Panama changed ocean currents enough to begin the onset of the last Ice Age, and forced our prehistoric ancestors to adapt and evolve.  “The limitations of evolutionary prediction extend beyond the vagaries of environmental change.  Even if imaginary evolutionists from outer space  had anticipated the coming Ice Age, they could never have foreseen the evolution of Homo.  They could not have anticipated the genetic changes that happened to provide natural selection with the raw material needed to grow the large brain of Homo. ” (Page 224).   From the library of the late environmentalist Dave Foreman.