Human remains

Book review of FOSSIL MEN: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind and THE SEDIMENTS OF TIME: My Lifelong Search for the Past

Among the riot of species that have lived on Earth over the last four billion years, only we can ponder our own origins — and it often angers the blood. We’re long past any serious debate that humanity evolved from apes in Africa a few million years ago, but the scientists looking for ever older bones of our ancestors always seem to be squabbling.

A few pages into Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind, the journalist Kermit Pattison concurs in his riveting account of the discovery of Ardipithecus, a sometimes climbing, sometimes walking proto-human