Handbook of Paleoanthropology

Paleoanthropology is perhaps the most multidisciplinary of all the sciences. Any complete account of the evolution and cultural and biological context of Homo sapiens must combine information from geology, paleoecology, primatology, evolutionary biology and a host of other fields. Above all, historical information needs to be combined with, and interpreted in the light of, what we know of the living world. Paleoanthropology is also an actively developing field in which much remains to be settled. The three volumes of this handbook bring together contributions by the world´s leading specialists that reflect the broad spectrum of modern paleoanthropology, thus presenting an indispensable resource for both professionals and students alike.

Volume 1 deals with principles, methods, and approaches. In recent years, enormous advances have been made in such areas as phylogenetic analysis, paleoecology and evolutionary theory and philosophy. The contributions in this first volume presentthe state of the art in these fields, provide succinct introductions to them and reflect the many ways in which they interact.

As human beings are primates, Volume 2 is devoted to primate origins, evolution, behaviour, and adaptive variety. Its emphasis is on integration of fossil data with the vast amount that is now known of the behaviour and ecology of living primates in natural environments.

Volume 3 deals with the fossil and molecular evidence for the evolution of Homo sapiens and its fossil relatives (the family Hominidae or subfamily Homininae, according to taste, a matter that we have left to the individual contributors).

".... yesterday I received a copy of your Handbook of Paleoanthropology.. I just want to congratulate you for doing such a great job. I think there is nothing comparably detailed in our field covering so many aspects as this handbook does. When I started reading in many of the chapters yesterday I couldn`t stop because it was so exciting to read about all these latest views and conclusions of our colleagues regarding so many interesting points. ......" (Prof. Dr. Günter Bräuer, Universität Hamburg)

Winfried Henke is retired Academic Director and apl. Professor of Anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He was born in 1944 in Pomerania, Germany, and studied biology, anthropology, geosciences, as well as philosophy and pedagogy in Kiel and Braunschweig. In 1971, he received his Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) from the University of Kiel, his thesis focusing on a prehistoric anthropological topic and multivariate statistical analysis in skeletal biology. Since 1971, Henke conducted research and taught at the Faculty of Biology of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in paleoanthropology, primatology, prehistoric anthropology, comparative morphology, systematics, demography, sociobiology, and scientific history. He had research activities in various countries (Iceland, Israel, Jordan, US, Greece), and in 1990, he habilitated with a monograph on the “Anthropology of Upper Paleolithics and Mesolithics of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin.” In the scope of the ERASMUS docent exchange program, intensive lecturing at numerous European Universities followed. Henke acted as elected anthropology referee for the German Research Foundation (DFG) and still serves at the advisory boards of scientific journals (e.g., Interdisziplinäre Anthropologie, published at Springer-Verlag); further, he was book review editor and advisory consultant to museums, e.g., the Neanderthal Museum (Germany). He published approximately 200 original papers in scientific journals and anthologies and several hundreds of book reviews and supervised more than 100 diplomas and Ph.D. theses in biological anthropology. He is author, coauthor (together with H. Rothe), and editor of several books including such standard works asPaläoanthropologie, Stammesgeschichte des Menschen, and Phylogenetische Systematik (published at Springer-Verlag). In 2006, he was awarded the honorary doctorate of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; he is an elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and Academician of the Leibniz-Sozietaet of Sciences.

Ian Tattersall is Curator Emeritus in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Trained in archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge and in geology and vertebrate paleontology at Yale, he has worked on lemur systematics and ecology as well as in paleoanthropology, where his special interest has been in hominid diversity and cognitive evolution. Most recently, he has been concerned with trying to understand how a nonlinguistic and nonsymbolic ancestor gave rise to the cognitively unprecedented Homo sapiens and what drove the exceptionally fast evolution of the human lineage over the course of the Pleistocene. He has done both primatological and paleontological fieldwork in countries as diverse as Madagascar, Vietnam, Surinam, Yemen, and Mauritius. In collaboration with Jeffrey Schwartz, he wrote three volumes of The Hominid Fossil Record (2002–2005), a documentation in standardized descriptive and illustrative format of a large proportion of the most significant fossils that tell the human evolutionary story. Ian is also a prominent interpreter of human paleontology to the public with several trade books to his credit, among them The Brain: Big Bangs, Behaviors, and Beliefs (2012, with Rob DeSalle), Masters of the Planet (2012), Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth (2011, with Rob DeSalle), The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE (2008), Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness (1998), and The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know About Human Evolution (1995, 2nd ed. 2009), as well as many articles inScientific American and Natural History and the coeditorship of the definitiveEncyclopedia of Human Evolution and Prehistory. He lectures widely and, as curator, has also been responsible for several major exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History including Ancestors: Four Million Years of Humanity(1984); Dark Caves, Bright Visions: Life In Ice Age Europe (1986); Madagascar: Island of the Ancestors (1989); The First Europeans: Treasures from the Hills of Atapuerca (2003); and the highly acclaimed Hall of Human Biology and Evolution (1993) and its successor, Hall of Human Origins (2007).