A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition

by Bill Bryson

  21 you would have to conclude that early hand tools were mostly made by antelopes: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.66.

  22 they show males and females evolving at different rates and in different directions: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.194.

  23 dismiss it as a mere “wastebasket species”: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.111.

  24 “it is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer”: quoted by Gribbin and Cherfas, The First Chimpanzee, p.60.

  25 “And of all the disciplines in science, paleoanthropology boasts perhaps the largest share of egos”: Swisher et al., Java Man, p.17.

  26 For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees: Tattersall, The Human Odyssey, p.60.

  27 “She is our earliest ancestor, the missing link between ape and human”: PBS Nova, “In Search of Human Origins,” first broadcast Aug. 1999.

  28 Johanson breezily replied that he had discounted the 106 bones of the hands and feet: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.147.

  29 “Lucy and her kind did not locomote in anything like the modern human fashion”: Tattersall, The Monkey in the Mirror, p.88.

  30 “Only when these hominids had to travel between arboreal habitats would they find themselves walking bipedally”: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.91.

  31 “Lucy’s hips and the muscular arrangement of her pelvis,” he has written: National Geographic, “Face-to-Face with Lucy’s Family,” March 1996, p.114.

  32 One, discovered by Meave Leakey of the famous fossil-hunting family at Lake Turkana in Kenya: New Scientist, 24 March 2001, p.5.

  33 making it the oldest hominid yet found—but only for a brief while: Nature, “Return to the Planet of the Apes,” 12 July 2001, p.131.

  34 In the summer of 2002 a French team working in the Djurab Desert of Chad … found a hominid almost seven million years old: Scientific American, “An Ancestor to Call our Own,” Jan. 2003, pp.54–63.

  35 Some critics believe that it was not human but an early ape: Nature, “Face to Face with our Past,” 19–26 Dec. 2002, p.735.

  36 when you are a small, vulnerable australopithecine, with a brain about the size of an orange, the risk must have been enormous: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.3; Drury, Stepping Stones, pp.335–6.

  37 “but that the forests left them”: Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human, p.135.

  38 For over three million years, Lucy and her fellow australopithecines scarcely changed at all: PBS Nova, “In Search of Human Origins,” first broadcast Aug. 1999.

  39 Absolute brain size: Gould, Ever since Darwin, pp.181–3.

  40 yet the australopithecines never took advantage of this useful technology that was all around them: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.338.

  41 “Perhaps,” suggests Matt Ridley, “we ate them”: Ridley, Genome, p.33.

  42 they make up only 2 per cent of the body’s mass, but devour 20 per cent of its energy: Drury, Stepping Stones, p.345.

  43 “The body is in constant danger of being depleted by a greedy brain”: Brown, The Energy of Life, p.216.

  44 C. Loring Brace stuck doggedly to the linear concept: Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, p.204.

  45 Homo erectus is the dividing line: Swisher et al., Java Man, p.131.

  46 It was from a boy aged between about nine and twelve who had died 1.54 million years ago: National Geographic, May 1997, p.90.

  47 The Turkana boy was “very emphatically one of us”: Tattersall, The Monkey in the Mirror, p.132.

  48 Someone had looked after her: Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, p.165.

  49 They were unprecedentedly adventurous and spread across the globe with what seems to have been breathtaking rapidity: Scientific American, “Food for Thought,” Dec. 2002, pp.108–15.

  Chapter 29: The Restless Ape

  1 “They made them in their thousands”: interview with Ian Tattersall, American Museum of Natural History, New York, 6 May 2002.

  2 “people may have first arrived substantially earlier than 60,000 years ago”: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 Jan. 2001.

  3 “There’s just a whole lot we don’t know about the movements of people before recorded history”: interview with Alan Thorne, Canberra, 20 Aug. 2001.

  4 “the most recent major event in human evolution—the emergence of our own species—is perhaps the most obscure of all”: Tattersall, The Human Odyssey, p.150.

  5 “whether any or all of them actually represent our species still awaits definitive clarification”: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.226.

  6 “odd, difficult-to-classify and poorly known”: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.412.

  7 No Neandertal remains have ever been found in north Africa, but their tool kits turn up all over the place: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.209.

  8 known to palaeoclimatology as the Boutellier interval: Fagan, The Great Journey, p.105.

  9 They survived for at least a hundred thousand years, and perhaps twice that: Tattersall and Schwartz, Extinct Humans, p.204.

  10 In 1947, while doing fieldwork in the Sahara: Trinkaus and Shipman, The Neandertals, p.300.

  11 It is still commonly held that Neandertals lacked the intelligence or fibre to compete on equal terms with the continent’s slender and more cerebrally nimble newcomers, Homo sapiens: Nature, “Those Elusive Neanderthals,” 25 Oct. 2001, p.791.

  12 “Modern humans neutralized this advantage … with better clothing, better fires and better shelter”: Stevens, The Change in the Weather, p.30.

  13 1.8 litres for Neandertals versus 1.4 for modern people: Flannery, The Future Eaters, p.301.

  14 “Rhodesian man … lived as recently as 25,000 years ago and may have been an ancestor of the African Negroes”: Canby, The Epic of Man, page unnoted.

  15 “you don’t have the front end looking like a donkey and the back end looking like a horse”: Science, “What—or Who—Did In the Neandertals?,” 14 Sept. 2001, p.1981.

  16 “all present-day humans are descended from that population”: Swisher et al., Java Man, p.189.

  17 But then people began to look a little more closely at the data: Scientific American, “Is Out of Africa Going Out the Door?,” August 1999.

  18 in 1997 scientists from the University of Munich managed to extract and analyse some DNA from the arm bone of the original Neandertal man: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Ancient DNA and the Origin of Modern Humans,” 16 Jan. 2001.

  19 suggested that all modern humans emerged from Africa within the past hundred thousand years and came from a breeding stock of no more than ten thousand individuals: Nature, “A Start for Population Genomics,” 7 Dec. 2000, p.65; Natural History, “What’s New in Prehistory,” May 2000, pp.90–1.

  20 “there’s more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps than in the entire human population”: Science, “A Glimpse of Humans’ First Journey out of Africa,” 12 May 2000, p.950.

  21 In early 2001, Thorne and his colleagues at the Australian National University reported that they had recovered DNA from the oldest of the Mungo specimens: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Mitochondrial DNA sequences in Ancient Australians: Implications for Modern Human Origins,” 16 Jan. 2001.

  22 “On the whole … the genetic record supports the out of Africa hypothesis”: interview with Rosalind Harding, Institute of Biological Anthropology, Oxford, 28 Feb. 2002.

  23 had noted how a palaeontologist, asked by a colleague whether he thought an old skull was varnished or not, had licked its top and announced that it was: Nature, 27 Sept. 2001, p.359.

  24 knowing of my interest in human origins for the present volume, had inserted a visit to Olorgesailie: Just for the record, the name is also commonly spelled Olorgasailie, including in some official
Kenyan materials. It was this spelling that I used in a small book I wrote for CARE concerning the visit. I am now informed by Ian Tattersall that the correct spelling is with a median “e.”

  Chapter 30: Goodbye

  1 “unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments”: quoted in Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, p.237.

  2 Australia … lost no less than 95 per cent: Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p.xv.

  3 “There’s no material benefit to hunting dangerous animals more often than you need to—there are only so many mammoth steaks you can eat”: New Scientist, “Mammoth Mystery,” 5 May 2001, p.34.

  4 only four types of really hefty … land animals: Flannery, The Eternal Frontier, p.195.

  5 human-caused extinction now may be running at as much as 120,000 times that level: Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p.241.

  6 He set off at once for the island, but by the time he got there the cat had killed them all: Flannery, The Future Eaters, pp.62–3.

  7 “At each successive discharge”: quoted in Matthiessen, Wildlife in America, pp.114–15.

  8 The zoo lost it: Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p.125.

  9 Hugh Cuming, who became so preoccupied with accumulating objects that he built a large ocean-going ship and employed a crew to sail the world full-time picking up whatever they could find: Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p.342.

  10 Millions of years of isolation had allowed Hawaii: National Geographic, “On the Brink: Hawaii’s Vanishing Species,” Sept. 1995, pp.2–37.

  11 The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family: Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p.84.

  12 a bird so sublimely rare that only one has ever been seen: Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p.76.

  13 By the early 1990s he had raised the figure to some six hundred per week: Easterbrook, A Moment on the Earth, p.558.

  14 “almost certainly an underestimate”: Washington Post, in Valley News, 27 Nov. 1995, “Report Finds Growing Biodiversity Threat.”

  15 “One planet, one experiment”: Wilson, Diversity of Life, p.182.

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