Tag Archives: natural history

The Humans Who Went Extinct

Posted on December 21, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived© 2010 Clive Finlayson256 pages Whatever happened to the Neanderthals? Did Homo sapiens drive our beefy cousins into extinction in the first of many exercises in genocide as we … Continue reading →

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The Ghosts of Evolution

Posted on July 31, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsense Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms© 2000 Connie Barlow291 pages Grocery stores are excellent places to encounter ghosts. They lurk in the fruit section, feasting on anachronisms. The biological world is a wondrous web … Continue reading →

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Catching Fire

Posted on May 9, 2012 by smellincoffee

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human © 2009 Richard Wrangham309 pages Cooking has created a great many fantastic dish throughout the centuries, but Richard Wrangham holds that the culinary art’s greatest triumph is us — humanity, for the advent of … Continue reading →

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The Oceans

Posted on January 21, 2012 by smellincoffee

The Oceans© 2000 Ellen J. Prager with Sylvia A. Earle314 pages Seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water, constituting a vast and largely unknown world of its own — vitally important to ours, but scarcely explored and … Continue reading →

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Walking with Dinosaurs

Posted on September 28, 2011 by smellincoffee

Walking with Dinosaurs: A Natural History© 1999 Tim Haines288 pages A dull pre-dawn light spreads across the horizon, illuminating a landscape covered in forest. Rivers trace silvery lines through the dense vegetation, and along their banks icy puddles are melting. … Continue reading →

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This Week at the Library (9 Feb – 15 Feb)

Posted on February 17, 2011 by smellincoffee

February has been dominated by fiction so far, helped in part by my recent back of Trek acquisitions which I’ve not yet exhausted. I’ve also been in a weird funk as of late, unable to find science and even history … Continue reading →

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African Exodus

Posted on September 29, 2010 by smellincoffee

African Exodus: the Origins of Modern Humanity© 1996 Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie282 pages “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history…” Ever since Charles Darwin made that first and solitary reference to human evolution in … Continue reading →

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Dinosaur Lives

Posted on June 9, 2010 by smellincoffee

Dinosaur Lives: Unearthing an Evolutionary Saga© 1998 John Horner256 pages    I picked up John Horner’s Dinosaur Lives  out of idle curiosity, not having read anything about dinosaurs since childhood. They remain of interest, of course, but it’s not an … Continue reading →

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Africa

Posted on June 2, 2010 by smellincoffee

Africa: a Biography of the Continent© 1997  John Reader816 pages And we are scatterlings of Africa, both you and I  We’re on the road to Phelemanga, beneath a copper sky; And we are scatterlings of Africa, on a journey to … Continue reading →

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