"A bright young scientist explains the intricacies of the animal kingdom through the lens of evolutionary biology. Why do giraffes have such long necks? Why are zebras striped? Why does a gazelle evade a hungry cheetah by leaping and bounding along a random path? Deploying the latest scientific research and his own extensive observations in Africa, Léo Grasset offers answers to these questions and many more in a book of post-Darwinian Just So Stories (the classic tales by Rudyard Kipling that offered fanciful accounts of how the features of assorted fauna came to be). Complex natural phenomena are explained in simple and at times comic terms, as Grasset turns evolutionary biology to the burning questions of the animal kingdom, from why elephants prefer dictators and buffaloes democracies, to whether the lion really is king. The human is, of course, just another animal, and the author's exploration of two million years of human evolution illustrates how it not only informs our current h