PositiveScience NewsIn Fossil Men, journalist Kermit Pattison recounts intriguing backstories of the Ardi scientists and how they came to challenge popular views of hominid evolution. Many incidents in the book show the courage and grit it took to find and excavate Ardi in Ethiopia’s remote Middle Awash area, where local nomadic groups are prone to shoot at outsiders. Pattison also examines how Ardi’s skeleton makes her a one-of-a-kind find ... The literary flow slows as Pattison probes the ins and outs of Ardi’s skeletal parts. But patient readers are rewarded with a vision of a somewhat apelike, somewhat monkeylike, somewhat humanlike creature, that, its discoverers argue, destroys the influential view that early hominids looked much like chimpanzees after having evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor. For anyone interested in fossil hunting, evolutionary science and a hominid skeleton like no other, this book delivers.
