The Dawn of Human Culture

Feeding my continuing fascination with the historical origins of consciousness and art, I finished reading Richard G. Klein's The Dawn of Human Culture last night. Klein demonstrates as well as any scientist I've read how well scientific practitioners (with a little help perhaps) can translate their work for a non-scientific audience. The book reminds me of the work of Ernst Mayr in that respect (I've never understood why Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould are considered such wonderful writers about science). The book is also an extended exploration of how difficult it is to make conclusive statements about human origins based on the available physical evidence, meaning the very meager collection of bones that Klein catalogues exhaustively through the book. Evolutionary theory is augmented by a kind of storytelling that is reminscent, as Klein points out, of the way legal cases are made.