Walking with Cavemen

by John Lynch and Louise Lynch, John; Barrett

Book Overview

This is the story of how a cocktail of extraordinary traits were combined to create us, human beings. Fusing epic science with the drama of individual lives, it is the tale of everyone on the planet... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0789497751
• ISBN13: 9780789497758
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley)
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 3.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 10.2" x 11.4"
• Age Range: 5 to 9 years
• Grade Range: Preschool to Grade 4

Customer Reviews

An essential rediscovery of our evolutionary prehistoric past in cavemen

Popular and ultimately continuing with the relese, of walking with the dinosaurs comes another series called walking with cavemen that,is to do with how our hominid family gradually and slowly evolved through means of adapation to climate within the area which became, for all primate species an epic saga for superemcy of survival that's existed within a branch that's stemmed out into a essential family tree of our prehistoric past of gaining a better idea on how we once were as species of hominid primates.Excellent book! five stars from me!

A good companion book...

Walking With Cavemen is a great companion book to the TV series, even with a foreword by Nigel Marven who starred in the BBC version but was never in any of the versions I saw. The book follows the series, with inserts of information about the fossils, stone tools and archaeologists that allow us to know what we know. But you have to remember that the series, and therefore the book, are mostly scenarios. Speculative reconstructions used to test our ideas and theories can sometimes seem outdated. And many are. But even if they prove to be wrong at least they tell us what early hominids did NOT do. How do we know some lived in family groups? Well, if somebody broke a leg and lived long enough to heal they were most likely taken care of. But how do we know they developed whites in their eyes? Did they use stone tools to hunt or just process dead bodies they found? When was fire truly discovered and controlled? We don't know or can only guess at some of it. But that is what makes such books and TV series so much fun.

An essential addition to the series

Like the first two publications in the series, "Walking with Dinosaurs" and "Walking with Prehistoric Beasts," "Walking with Cavemen" follows the same format and is packed with full color photographs, but focuses exclusively on the evolution of humans. It describes the lives, trials, and even thought processes of the main "characters" in the story of mankind's development, including, but not limited to, Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, and modern Homo sapiens.Unlike its predecessors, which feature a combination of computer-generated images and photographs, "Cavemen" uses no artificially produced images (except for some of the prehistoric animals), relying solely on actual photographs of live human models/actors with elaborate costumes and make-up artistry. The advantage is that this results in more realistic pictures because they are not doctored up, unlike those featured in "Dinosaurs" and "Beasts," some of which (though not all) appeared somewhat fake, because they were.The downside, however, is that this resulted in a huge disparity between the appearances of the australopithecines of "Cavemen" and their computer-generated counterparts of "Beasts." It also, unfortunately, resulted in pictures which, though quite realistic, are disappointingly inaccurate. Not conforming to the text's descriptions of our ancestors who were long armed and short legged or with no chin, the pictures reveal Neanderthals with chins as prominent as ours and australopithecines with our body proportions.Nevertheless, "Walking with Cavemen" is superb. The text, though inevitably speculative in places, is highly informative, enlightening, and thought-provoking, and the pictures go a long way toward giving us an idea of what it would actually be like to come face to face with our apelike ancestors. It is an excellent companion to the "Walking with Cavemen" video and a must for fans of "Walking with Dinosaurs" and "Walking with Prehistoric Beasts" as well as anyone with an interest in human evolution.