Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything

“Dart could see at once . . .” Walker and Shipman, p. 90.

“he would sometimes bury their bodies . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 233.

“Dart spent five years working up a monograph . . .” Lewin, Bones of Contention , p. 82.

“sat as a paperweight on a colleague’s desk.” Walker and Shipman, p. 93.

“announced the discovery of Sinanthropus pekinensis . . .” Swisher, et al., Java Man, p. 75.

“enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones . . .” Swisher et al., p. 77.

“Solo People were known . . .” Swisher, et al., p. 211.

“in 1960 F. Clark Howell of the University of Chicago . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, pp. 267-68.

“our understanding of human prehistory . . .” Washington Post , “Skull Raises Doubts About Our Ancestry.” March 22, 2001.

“You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck . . .” Ian Tattersall interview, American Museum of Natural History, New York, May 6, 2002.

“early hand tools were mostly made by antelopes.” Walker and Shipman, p. 82.

“males and females evolving at different rates . . .” Walker and Shipman, p. 133.

“dismiss it as a mere ‘wastebasket species’ . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 111.

“have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer.” Quoted by Gribbin and Cherfas, The First Chimpanzee , p. 60.

“perhaps the largest share of egos . . .” Swisher et al., p. 17.

“unpredictable and high-decibel personal verbal assaults . . .” Swisher et al., p. 140.

“For the first 99.99999 percent of our history . . .” Tattersall, The Human Odyssey , p. 60.

“She is our earliest ancestor . . .” PBS Nova , June 3, 1997, “In Search of Human Origins.”

“discounted the 106 bones of the hands and feet . . .” Walker and Shipman, p. 181.

“Lucy and her kind did not locomote . . .” Tattersall, The Monkey in the Mirror , p. 89.

“Only when these hominids had to travel . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 91.

“Lucy’s hips and the muscular arrangement of her pelvis . . .” National Geographic , “Face-to-Face with Lucy’s Family,” March 1996, p. 114.

“One, discovered by Meave Leakey . . .” New Scientist , March 24, 2001, p. 5.

“the oldest hominid yet found . . .” Nature , “Return to the Planet of the Apes,” July 12, 2001, p. 131.

“found a hominid almost seven million years old . . .” Scientific American , “An Ancestor to Call Our Own,” January 2003, pp. 54-63.

“Some critics believe that it was not human . . .” Nature , “Face to Face with Our Past,” December 19-26, 2002, p. 735.

“when you are a small, vulnerable australopithecine . . .” Stevens, p. 3; and Drury, pp. 335-36.

“but that the forests left them . . .” Gribbin and Gribbin, Being Human , p. 135.

“For over three million years . . .” PBS Nova , “In Search of Human Origins,” first broadcast August 1999.

“yet the australopithecines never took advantage . . .” Drury, p. 338.

“‘Perhaps,’ suggests Matt Ridley, ‘we ate them.’ ” Ridley, Genome , p. 33.

“they make up only 2 percent of the body’s mass . . .” Drury, p. 345.

“The body is in constant danger . . .” Brown, p. 216.

“C. Loring Brace stuck doggedly to the linear concept . . .” Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms , p. 204.

“ Homo erectus is the dividing line . . .” Swisher et al., p. 131.

“It was of a boy aged between about nine and twelve . . .” National Geographic , May 1997, p. 90.

“the Turkana boy was ‘very emphatically one of us.’ ” Tattersall, The Monkey in the Mirror , p. 105.

“Someone had looked after her.” Walker and Shipman, p. 165.

“they were unprecedentedly adventurous . . .” Scientific American, “Food for Thought,” December 2002, pp. 108-15.

“couldn’t be compared with anything else . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 132.

“Tattersall and Schwartz don’t believe that goes nearly far enough.” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 169.

“They made them in the thousands . . .” Ian Tattersall, interview by author, American Museum of Natural History, New York, May 6, 2002.

“people may have first arrived substantially earlier . . .” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , January 16, 2001.

“There’s just a whole lot we don’t know . . .” Alan Thorne, interview by author, Canberra, August 20, 2001.

“the most recent major event in human evolution . . .” Tattersall, The Human Odyssey , p. 150.

“whether any or all of them actually represent our species . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 226.

“odd, difficult-to-classify and poorly known . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 412.

“No Neandertal remains have ever been found in north Africa . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 209.

“known to paleoclimatology as the Boutellier interval . . .” Fagan, The Great Journey , p. 105.

“They survived for at least a hundred thousand years . . .” Tattersall and Schwartz, p. 204.

“In 1947, while doing fieldwork in the Sahara . . .” Trinkaus and Shipman, p. 300.

“Neandertals lacked the intelligence or fiber to compete . . .” Nature , “Those Elusive Neanderthals,” October 25, 2001, p. 791.

“Modern humans neutralized this advantage . . .” Stevens, p. 30.

“1.8 liters for Neandertals versus 1.4 for modern people . . .” Flannery, The Future Eaters , p. 301.

“Rhodesian man . . . lived as recently as 25,000 years ago . . .” Canby, The Epic of Man , page unnoted.

“the front end looking like a donkey . . .” Science , “What-or Who-Did In the Neandertals?” September 14, 2001, p. 1981.

“all present-day humans are descended from that population . . .” Swisher et al., p. 189.

“people began to look a little more closely . . .” Scientific American , “Is Out of Africa Going Out the Door?” August 1999.

“DNA from the arm bone of the original Neandertal man . . .” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , “Ancient DNA and the Origin of Modern Humans,” January 16, 2001.

“all modern humans emerged from Africa . . .” Nature , “A Start for Population Genomics,” December 7, 2000, p. 65, and Natural History, “What’s New in Prehistory,” May 2000, pp. 90-91.

“more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps . . .” Science , “A Glimpse of Humans’ First Journey Out of Africa,” May 12, 2000, p. 950.

“In early 2001, Thorne and his colleagues . . .” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , “Mitochondrial DNA Sequences in Ancient Australians: Implications for Modern Human Origins,” January 16, 2001.

“the genetic record supports the out of Africa hypothesis.” Rosalind Harding interview, Institute of Biological Anthropology, February 28, 2002.