About this item
One of the fundamental questions of our existence is why we are so smart. There are lots of drawbacks to having a large brain, including the huge food intake needed to keep the organ running, the frequency with which it goes wrong, and our very high infant and mother mortality rates compared with other mammals, due to the difficulty of giving birth to offspring with very large heads. So why did evolution favour the brainy ape? This question has been widely debated among biological anthropologists, and in recent years, Maslin and his colleagues have pioneered a new theory that might just be the answer. Looking back to a crucial period some 1.9 million years ago, when brain capacity increased by as much as 80%, The Cradle of Humanity explores the implications of two adaptive responses by our hominin ancestors to rapid climatic changes - big jaws, and big brains.
About the Author
The world around us is an amazing and beautiful place. Science adds another layer of appreciation and makes our World even more stunning and unique. I passionately believe it is the responsibility of scientists to communicate our knowledge and our wonder. My books include the high successful 'Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction' (OUP, 2014) , The Cradle of Humanity (OUP, 2017) and The Human Planet co-authored with Simon Lewis (Penguin, 2018) .OK about me - I have made it to the heady heights of a Professor of climatology and environmental sciences at University College London. I am a leading scientist with particular expertise in global and regional climatic change both in the past and the future and I have publish over 160 papers in journals such as Science, Nature, The Lancet and Nature Climate Change. But as I said my passion is to communicate the wonder of science and what it can tell us about the world around us and about ourselves. I written 11 books, over 50 popular articles and I do appear regularly on radio and television. My blogs on the 'Conversation' (https://theconversation.com/uk) cover human evolution, climate change and the Anthropocene and have been read over 1 million times.I was included in Who's Who for the first time in 2009 and am a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Scholar. Oh I also run a company called Rezatec Ltd which produces environmental solutions for companies, NGOs and Governments - making the world a better place through use of real data.Also thought you may like some shocking facts from my latest book with Simon Lewis "The Human Planet"For the first time in our planet's 4.5-billion year history a single species, humans, are dictating its future.Humans are having as much affect on the Earth's environment as giant meteorites, mega-volcanoes and the movement of the continental plates.Humans have cut down half the trees on Earth, over 3 trillion of them, since the beginning of civilization.Humans have created over 170,000 synthetic mineral-like substances compared with about 5,000 "natural" occurring minerals.Humans make over 300 million tonnes of plastic per year which can be found in ever ocean.Humans have made enough concrete to cover the whole surface of the Earth in a layer 2 mm thick.Humans move more soil, rock and sediment each year than is transported by all other natural processes combined.Humans have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by over 45%, acidifying the oceans and raising Earth's temperature delaying the next ice age by tens of thousands of years.If you weigh all land mammals in the world, 30% is the weight of humans, 67% our livestock with just 3% being wild animals we see on wildlife programmes.
