Walking With Cavemen: Eye-To-Eye With Your Ancestors

Rating:
Summary: An essential addition to the series
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Annoying Stereotypes and Lack of Scholarly Citations
Review: Yet another book of evolutionary conjecture with lots of pictures.

The paleo/archaeologocial info seems sound on the surface, but honestly, WHEN will publishers stop producing books that play to modern stereotypes of gender division and the myth of the universal "nuclear" family?

On the cover, an elderly female marches along with her ergaster compatriots -- albeit bringing up the rear of the party. In several other places in the book the same "hunting party" is depicted...however, in all other images the female is in the middle. I find it distressing that with numerous images of the *same* group, the editors found it necessary that the cover image switch the female from the middle of the group (as she is most often depicted throughout the rest of the volume) to the back.

Of course, my absolute favorite idiocy must be the photo caption from page 146: "Ergaster marked the beginning of forming male-female partnerships in hominids..." I'd love to know exactly what data the editors are using in order to make such a heavy-handed statement.

Conjecture is just that...and the heritage of depicting modern cultural traditions as fact in evolutionary history is really revolting -- not to mention misleading to readers.

If you're looking for a book where factual data takes backseat to computer graphics, this is just your ticket. If, however, you'd like a scholarly work, you'd better go elsewhere.

This book doesn't even have a BASIC bibliography, let alone footnotes or works cited.

Piffle.