Word: casefuls
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...school board--that large-scale evolution must be dubious because the process has not been directly observed--smacks of absurdity and only reveals ignorance about the nature of science. Good science integrates observation with inference. No process that unfolds over such long stretches of time (mostly, in this case, before humans appeared), or at an infinitude beneath our powers of direct visualization (subatomic particles, for example), can be seen directly. If justification required eyewitness testimony, we would have no sciences of deep time--no geology, no ancient human history either. (Should I believe Julius Caesar ever existed? The hard bony...
Earlier discoveries at Gona, an Ethiopian site about 60 miles north of Bouri, had already shown that someone was using carefully manufactured stone tools in the area at about that time. Now Asfaw and White's team could make a circumstantial case that their species, A. garhi, was the gifted toolmaker. If so, this was a crucial bit of scientific sleuthing. In the 2 million years since the first human ancestor began to walk upright, nothing much had changed. Now something had. Rather than just using sticks and stones to leverage innate abilities--something done by plenty of animals, from...
Besides, one isolated case can't explain the demise of an entire population spread across thousands of miles. The mystery is all the greater as paleoanthropologists learn how similar to our own ancestors the Neanderthals were. They hunted cooperatively, they buried their dead, and their brains were as big as ours. The species' relative equality, says Trinkaus, "makes perfect sense, given that the two groups coexisted for several thousand years without one or the other being dominant...
...experience may provoke grand writing, as it does in three new nautical sagas. Godforsaken Sea (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; 272 pages; $22.95) is one of the best books ever written about sailing--in this case the extreme sailing required to go around the world solo in the toughest of all sailboat races, the Vendee Globe. Aboard wide-beamed, thin-hulled, 60-ft. racing machines--surfboards for maniacs, once they get to the 50-ft. waves of the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica--the Vendee Globe competitors are bound by brutally simple rules. They stipulate one boat, one person...
...Perlman's Ordeal (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 329 pages; $24), novelist Brooks Hansen has some serious fun imagining the case of Sylvie Blum, a.k.a. Nina, the pubescent bringer of confusion and disarray into the physician's otherwise detached and antiseptic existence. As a hypnotherapist, Perlman is a hands-off healer. As a closet onanist, he is a hands-on pioneer of safe...