human origins and the search for “missing links”人类起源和寻找u201c失踪链接u201d.pdfVIP

Book Review/Science in the Media Human Origins and the Search for ‘‘Missing Links’’ Johannes Krause* Institute for Archaeological Sciences, University of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany Humans are naturally fascinated by we anatomically modern humans are the questions concerning our own origin, not sole survivors. just where we come from but what made The discovery of a yet unknown human us the way we are. In almost all cultures fossil, therefore, still receives tremendous and religions one finds some form of attention from the media and public and is creation myth explaining how their tribe often presented as shining a new light on or people came into existence, ranging our evolution, questioning previous inter- from the Mayan god Heart-of-Sky that pretations, and presenting a new link after several failed attempts finally made between various branches of our evolu- the true men from maize to the biblical tionary tree. Such fossils are often referred god that created man from wet clay and to as ‘‘missing links’’, because they present women from Adam’s rib. Yet it wasn’t the first physical evidence that lends until the middle of the 19th century that credibility to previous theoretical specula- the scientific debate about the origin of tions about our past. our species took off, sparked by a single In his new book, Missing Links: In Search short hint in On the Origin of Species by of Human Origins, the author John Reader Charles Darwin that challenged the gives a detailed account of the often broadly accepted view of the time that exciting stories behind the