The Human Career

Chronicles the evolution of people from the earliest primates through the emergence of fully modern humans within the past 200,000 years. The work stresses late-1990s advances in knowledge, including ever more abundant evidence that fully modern humans originated in Africa and spread from there, replacing the Neanderthals in Europe and equally archaic people in Asia. With its coverage of both the fossil record and the archaeological record over the 2.5 million years for which both are available, Richard Klein emphasizes that human morphology and behaviour evolved together. Throughout the text, Klein also presents evidence for alternative points of view. In addition to outlining the broad pattern of human evolution, the text details the kinds of data that support this pattern, including information on archaeological sites, artefacts, fossils and methods for establishing dates in geological time.