Russell L. Ciochon - Böcker

"Peking Man," a cave man once thought a great hunter who had first tamed fire, was actually a composite of the gnawed remains of some fifty women, children, and men unfortunate enough to have been the prey of the giant cave hyena. Researching the famous fossil site of Dragon Bone Hill in China, scientists Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon retell the story of the cave's unique species of early human, Homo erectus.Boaz and Ciochon take readers on a gripping scientific odyssey. New evidence shows that Homo erectus was an opportunist who rode a tide of environmental change out Africa and into Eurasia, puddle-jumping from one gene pool to the next. Armed with a shaky hold on fire and some sharp rocks, Homo erectus incredibly survived for over 1.5 million years, much longer than our own species Homo sapiens has been on Earth. Tell-tale marks on fossil bones show that the lives of these early humans were brutal, ruled by hunger and who could strike the hardest blow, yet there are fleeting glimpses of human compassion as well. The small brain of Homo erectus and its strangely unchanging culture indicate that the species could not talk. Part of that primitive culture included ritualized aggression, to which the extremely thick skulls of Homo erectus bear mute witness. Both a vivid recreation of the unimagined way of life of a prehistoric species, so similar yet so unlike us, and a fascinating exposition of how modern multidisciplinary research can test hypotheses in human evolution, Dragon Bone Hill is science writing at its best.

Primate Evolution and Human Origins compiles, for the first time, the major ideas and publications that have shaped our current view of the evolutionary biology of the primates and the origin of the human line. Designed for freshmen-to-graduate students in anthropology, paleontology, and biology, the book is a unique collection of classic papers, culled from the past 20 years of research. It is also an important reference for academicians and researchers, as it covers the entire scope of primate and human evolution (with an emphasis on the fossil record). A comprehensive bibliography cites over 2000 significant articles not found in the main text.

Like many concepts, privacy has a commonly accepted core of meaning with an indefinite or variable periphery. Some would wish to enlarge the core. It would be pointless to attempt to establish a definition by way of introduction to a series of essays that themselves provide no single definition. But the themes of freedom, justice, rational choice, and community always seem to appear in any discussion of privacy. Privacy is a penultimate good. Perhaps, in certain usages--such as autonomy--it is an ultimate good, desirable for its own sake and grounded on nothing more final. Of course, the right of privacy may sometimes be asserted to conceal illegal or immoral acts. When that occurs, it appears to be put to an instrumental use. But, insofar as we justify such claims, it is not because they prevent the detection of immorality or violations of the law. Rather, at least in the case of illegal acts, it is because the means being challenged themselves violate privacy.The individual control-human dignity foundation for privacy, is closely related to personality. Privacy provides relief from tension and opportunity for the development of intimate relations with others. All of us have standards of behavior that are higher than we can maintain at all times, and these standards are widely shared in the society in which we live. If we do not observe them we are likely to be criticized, or we fear that we shall be, and we suffer also from loss of self-esteem. Whether in some final sense the concept of privacy is culture bound is impossible to establish, in the absence of any known society in which elements of privacy are not to be found.

Primate Evolution and Human Origins compiles, for the first time, the major ideas and publications that have shaped our current view of the evolutionary biology of the primates and the origin of the human line. Designed for freshmen-to-graduate students in anthropology, paleontology, and biology, the book is a unique collection of classic papers, culled from the past 20 years of research. It is also an important reference for academicians and researchers, as it covers the entire scope of primate and human evolution (with an emphasis on the fossil record). A comprehensive bibliography cites over 2000 significant articles not found in the main text.

Like many concepts, privacy has a commonly accepted core of meaning with an indefinite or variable periphery. Some would wish to enlarge the core. It would be pointless to attempt to establish a definition by way of introduction to a series of essays that themselves provide no single definition. But the themes of freedom, justice, rational choice, and community always seem to appear in any discussion of privacy. Privacy is a penultimate good. Perhaps, in certain usages--such as autonomy--it is an ultimate good, desirable for its own sake and grounded on nothing more final. Of course, the right of privacy may sometimes be asserted to conceal illegal or immoral acts. When that occurs, it appears to be put to an instrumental use. But, insofar as we justify such claims, it is not because they prevent the detection of immorality or violations of the law. Rather, at least in the case of illegal acts, it is because the means being challenged themselves violate privacy.The individual control-human dignity foundation for privacy, is closely related to personality. Privacy provides relief from tension and opportunity for the development of intimate relations with others. All of us have standards of behavior that are higher than we can maintain at all times, and these standards are widely shared in the society in which we live. If we do not observe them we are likely to be criticized, or we fear that we shall be, and we suffer also from loss of self-esteem. Whether in some final sense the concept of privacy is culture bound is impossible to establish, in the absence of any known society in which elements of privacy are not to be found.