The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors.

THE FIRST HUMAN: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors

ANN GIBBONS 

Anthropologists face a variety of obstacles as they search for fossils in Africa, the cradle of humanity: sandstorms, relentless heat, and the occasional landmine. They also face interpersonal challenges, as researchers vie to locate the anthropological Holy Grail: the fossil that will definitively identify humanity's earliest ancestor. Gibbons writes about human evolution for Science magazine. In her exciting narrative, she chronicles the work of four international teams in a sometimes-dangerous race to identify the clues to how humans diverged evolutionarily from chimpanzees some 5 million to 7 million years ago. The cast of characters includes paleoanthropologists Tim White of the United States and Michel Brunet of France, African zoologist Meave Leakey, and British geologists Martin Pickford and Brigitte Senut. In recent years, these groups have vied to claim discovery of the oldest human ancestor, starting with White's find of a 4-million-year-old partial skeleton in Ethiopia in 1992. Gibbons provides a firsthand account of the challenges faced by these groups, including not only the competition but also the bureaucracy of getting permits for digs, the logistics of survival in remote places, and ego clashes among the fossil hunters. Random House, 2006, 336 p., b&w plates, hardcover, $26.00.