Review: The Fossil Trail

I went on a birthday book-buying binge (oooh, alliteration!), so I expect to be writing up a few book reviews in the near future. The first one is now!

I just finished The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know About Human Evolution by Ian Tattersall, who is currently with the American Museum of Natural History. It's the revised edition of a book first released in 1995. I would rate the reading as being on the level of a college-level introductory paleoanthropology course. Having never done any previous reading on the subject matter before, I still found Tattersall's explanations relatively easy to follow.

One thing I noticed throughout the book is that it is rife with typos. The book otherwise seemed to be of pretty decent quality, but the missing letters and duplicate letters ran rampant throughout the book, and it got pretty irritating after a while. Tattersall also seemed to have a bit of trouble organizing his material, with a large number of instances of "more on that later," but that could simply be due to the complexity of subject matter being squeezed into one volume. It can also be difficult to keep up with the large number of fossil specimens specifically dealt with in the text. The additional chapters added for the second edition, though, did a pretty good job of bringing the text up to speed with current developments in the field, and I thought Tattersall's treatment of the subject matter was pretty enlightening and thought-provoking.

Some thoughts this book brought to mind:

1) I hadn't truly realized how young the science of paleoanthropology is, nor how arbitrary species classification is. Really, when I began to comprehend how much uncertainty riddles the field, I almost began to have some idea of how there are people in the world who can still militantly oppose the idea of evolution. I say "almost," because with some of those people, I'm pretty sure that even if there were no uncertainty in the field, they would be just as militant in their objections anyway.

2) The book addresses the fact that species classification is only possible because of gaps in the fossil record, which reminds me of an article I read some time ago that discussed offspring always being the same species as the parents... so presumably, if there were no gaps in the fossil record, there would theoretically only be one species from us all the way back to our point of origin. The same would be true of every other species on the planet. Then, theoretically, by this reasoning, if we all descended from some common single-celled organism, we would all have to be classified as the same species. That possibility puts me in mind of the Native American "all my relations" concept of all living things being our brethren. It was a profound moment in my reading. I had to sit the book down and process that idea for a minute before I went on. That one train of thought alone made it worthwhile for me to pick up this book on impulse off the table at Half Price Books.

Overall, I really enjoyed this read, and would recommend it to anyone who gets into science, anthropology, human evolution, and the like. I would particularly recommend it to folks who are interested in those topics but don't have a previous background in studying those topics. If you've studied the subject matter already, this overview of the development of the field of paleoanthropology may be a bit too basic for you.