Essay --

For this assignment, I chose â€Å"The Origin of Modern Humans† by Roger Lewin as my book to read for my book report. Roger Lewin is a British award-winning science author and writer of 20 books. He was employed at New Scientist in London for about nine years. He went to Washington, D.C. to write books and other pieces for science for ten years as news editor. The book by him that I chose, in 201 pages, this book explained answers to questions like where and when modern humans first appeared, what features distinguish modern humans, who our immediate ancestors were, and many more. For example, the subtopics are; the African origin, the multiregional origin, the archeology of modern humans, language and modern human origins, symbolism and images, mitochondrial divergence, human variation, and an overview of homosapieans and the modern debate. In this book there are two main views in paleoanthropology, the study of humankind, about the origin of modern humans: the African origin and the multiregional origin. The recent African origin of modern humans is the popular theory. The theory is called the â€Å"Out-of-Africa model†, and is also known more professionally as the recent single-origin hypothesis. The book speaks about how the hypothesis that humans have a single origin was published in Charles Darwin's book. The idea was mostly hypothetical until the 1980s, when it was confirmed by a study of DNA, combined with evidence based on physical studies of old specimens. According to genetic and fossil evidence, the original homosapiens evolved to modern humans only in Africa, around 200,000 to 100,000 years ago, with people from one area leaving Africa about 60,000 years ago and over a period of time taking over earlier human populations lik... ...was cute and very interesting how successful she was at speaking the English language and I also thought it was cute and heart-warming at the same time. It was fascinating how a chimpanzee could know more words than some toddlers. The thing I liked least about this book was the lengthiness and wordiness of it. It was very round-about in getting to the point or conclusion of the topic. It had a lot of extra information that I felt wasn’t necessary or just didn’t really have a place in the chapter. I also found some subtopics much less interesting than others. I personally would not recommend this book. I did like some parts but I disliked it more than I liked it and unless someone is very passionate about this subject I wouldn’t tell them to read it because they would probably find it boring or it would be hard for them to understand certain parts like it was for me.