"In his new book human paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall argues that a long tradition of "human exceptionalism" in paleoanthropology has distorted the picture of human evolution. Drawing partly on his own career-- from young scientist in awe of his elders to crotchety elder statesman-- Tattersall offers an idiosyncratic look at the competitive world of paleoanthropology, beginning with Charles Darwin 150 years ago, and continuing through the Leakey...

"Where did we come from? What makes us human? NOVA's...investigation explores how new discoveries are transforming views of our earliest ancestors. Featuring interviews with world-renowned scientists, footage shot "in the trenches" as fossils were unearthed, and...computer-generated animation, [these programs] bring early hominids to life, examining how we became the creative and adaptable modern humans of today...In the first episode...encounter..."Selam,...

An investigation of the Pleistocene's dual character, as a geologic time, and as a cultural idea. The Pleistocene is the epoch of geologic time closest to our own, a time of ice ages, global migrations, and mass extinctions--of woolly rhinos, mammoths, giant ground sloths, and not least, early species of Homo. It's the world that created ours. But outside that environmental story there exists a parallel narrative that describes how our ideas about...

"Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and journalist Thomas Trappe offer a new way of understanding our past, present, and future. Krause is a pioneer in the revolutionary new science of archaeogenetics, archaeology augmented by revolutionary DNA sequencing technology, which has allowed scientists to uncover a new version of human history reaching back more than 100,000 years. Using this technology to...