Their stares and their belts made us rather nervous.'), and occasionally dangers (''Get that plane up fast, Richard (Leakey)!''). His anecdotes convey the excitement of digging up evidence of ancient life and the associated frustrations ('This is the list of break-downs on a brand-new machine, just for my memory when I talk to the manufacturers.'), unsettling moments ('When I looked at the belts closely, I realised they were leather strings from which dangled peculiar wrinkled objects: the testicles of the men they had killed. Authenticity is guaranteed, as one of the authors, Walker, has been involved with the story of Proconsul for some 40 years. It tells of the associated history of scientific thoughts, of their development in the light of new evidence and of their subjection to preconceptions and personal ambition. The Ape in the Tree combines adventure story with accounts of the painstaking work that underpins scientific progress. He fell victim to a crocodile a few months after sending the fossils. Pigott was an early casualty on the fringe of what would become one of the most enduring palaeontological adventures of the 20th century. Of the many risks encountered by British officials in the more remote parts of their empire at the dawn of the 20th century, the one that brought an end to Pigott's life was not the most obvious. Regrettably, Pigott did not live to realise the significance of his action. The first Miocene fossils to reach the British scientific establishment from the Kenyan shores of Lake Victoria were sent to London's British Museum in 1909 by Dayrell Botry Pigott, then assistant district commissioner of the Kavirondo region of western Kenya. That early relative is Proconsul, named after a Victorian performing chimpanzee called Consul, and it lived in the Miocene of East Africa. It reaches further back in time, to an earlier relative, closer to the last common ancestor we share with all the other modern apes, the chimpanzees, the gorillas, the orang-utans and the gibbons. This book does not dwell on the usual subjects of popular palaeo-anthropological writing, the bipedal or semi-bipedal creatures that have peopled the East African landscape and beyond for the past 5 million to 6 million years. The Ape in the Tree, by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman, is an engaging chronicle that centres on the discovery and scientific interpretation of one of those early apes. The Miocene world was the true 'planet of the apes'. One of the groups of mammals that reached an unprecedented diversity during the Miocene was that of the apes. It was a time of warm global climates, towards the end of which our evolutionary lineage diverged from that of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees. The Miocene epoch lasted from about 23.8 million to 5.3 million years ago.

Alan walker on my way 是