The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution is by a scientist Dean Falk, who has contributed significantly to the study of evolution of the human brain, and who has been directly involved in some of the more interesting controversies in human evolution.

Back when I was a graduate student I was assigned by my advisor a set of literature to absorb and comment on. The mix of published and soon to be published papers included a series of papers written by Ralph Holloway and Dean Falk. These represented a fight over the interpretation of early hominid brains as studied through endocasts. Endocasts are fossilized casts of the inside of an animal’s brain case or the artificially produced version made of casting material poured into a skull. Either way, you get a roundish blob that resembles the exterior of the original brain. Endocasts are of limited value, as layers of tissue in a living mammal separate the brain from the skull, attenuating detail. As Falk point out in her book, endocasts are a rather “surficial” view of a brain, but are not without their uses.

Fossil endocasts are compared to endocasts made from the skulls of “living” primates and humans, which in turn are understood via Continue reading A Book about Taung and "the Hobbit" →