I got Kermit Pattison's Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind from my local library after reading about in The New York Times. It's really good. I gave it 3.5 stars out of 5 on my LibraryThing account. Some of the science was over my head, I thought about 100 pages could have been cut, and the ending was a little weak, but I'll give the book as a gift to friends and family who are into science. Fascinating that millions of years ago, only 2% of our ancestors had cavities (apparently the advent of cereal agriculture is what did our teeth in, and sugary drinks in the past 150 years or so didn't help).
Amazing how much academic backstabbing there is in the world of paleoanthropology. The star of this book, Tim White, is a real jerk-hole. His animosity to laypersons, in my opinion, has hurt his discoveries. Before reading this book, I never heard of our Ardi ancestor, however, I was aware of Lucy, probably because the finders of that fossil are good at public relations.
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