William H. Calvin

It took me an unreasonably long time to get into this book, mostly because of the format. Each chapter was topped with a header like that of an email, sent to "Human Evolution E-Seminar" and listing the latitude and longitude of the author's location on some worldwide tour of important sites in human evolution. There was nothing on the flaps or in the introduction about this being an e-seminar? Was it? Was the author really teaching a class? Really on a worldwide tour of paleontology and archaeology? Or was it all some conceit to structure the book? If so, why? Because it was dead annoying. It was already enough that the author assumed a familiarity with both the history of human evolution, its prevalent theories, and climate jargon. Adding the layer of this e-seminar just made me me vaguely anxious, like somehow I'd signed up for a class without having taken the prerequisites and that there was going to be trouble come midterm time.

Which is a shame because there was a lot of fascinating content once the rest was sifted through. I came away with three main ideas. One was that a main reason that human evolution occurred so quickly was thanks to many repeated boom-bust cycles caused by abrupt (and extreme!) climate change flip-flops, the second was an extended argument abou the nature of a widespread and long-used artifact from human tool-production history, and then the final third or so is devoted to discussing possible mechanisms for abrupt climate flip-flops and the evidence for those.

That last idea is why I bought the book, and it didn't disappoint. Though now I'm very curious about how this idea has aged (this book was published 2002) and what the current thinking on the topic is. I need to read more about climate.… (more)