Bøger af Dean Falk

Identifying a period before the Stone Age that represents a key turning point in human evolution, The Botanic Age provides a fascinating new look at the first three million years of hominin existence.

In this unusual book an evolutionary anthropologist and her coauthor/granddaughter, who has Asperger syndrome, examine the emergence and spread of Asperger syndrome and other forms of high-functioning autism. Falk theorizes that many characteristics associated with Asperger syndrome are by-products of the evolution of advanced mental processing.

The collected papers of this volume will appeal to students of primate and hominid evolution, neuroscientists, sociobiolo gists, and other behaviorists who seek a better understanding of the substrates of primate, including human, behavior.

A controversial new theory that the origins of spoken language, music, and art lie in the early communication between mothers and infants

Two discoveries of early human relatives, one in 1924 and one in 2003, radically changed scientific thinking about our origins. Dean Falk, a pioneer in the field of human brain evolution, offers this fast-paced insider's account of these discoveries, the behind-the-scenes politics embroiling the scientists who found and analyzed them, and the academic and religious controversies they generated. The first is the Taung child, a two-million-year-old skull from South Africa that led anatomist Raymond Dart to argue that this creature had walked upright and that Africa held the key to the fossil ancestry of our species. The second find consisted of the partial skeleton of a three-and-a-half-foot-tall woman, nicknamed Hobbit, from Flores Island, Indonesia. She is thought by scientists to belong to a new, recently extinct species of human, but her story is still unfolding. Falk, who has studied the brain casts of both Taung and Hobbit, reveals new evidence crucial to interpreting both discoveries and proposes surprising connections between this pair of extraordinary specimens.