The In Search of series of twelve 12,000-word short read eBooks are a follow-up to my full-sized works Humans: from the Beginning, Prehistoric Investigations, and Astronomy: from the Beginning. They are available either individually or in the Prehistoric Investigations 2 omnibus.
THE FIRST HOMININS
Before the first humans came the age of the australopithecines – apes that walked upright like humans, but with brains no larger than those of chimpanzees.
HOMO ERECTUS
In the late nineteenth century, Dutch anthropologist Eugène Dubois found the first example of an extinct human that had lived significantly before Homo sapiens.
THE ACHEULEAN HAND AXE
A multifunction tool that remained in use, more or less unchanged, for 1,750,000 years.
PILTDOWN MAN
The story of the most notorious hoax in the history of palaeoanthropology.
HOMO HEIDELBERGENSIS
How Homo sapiens emerged into a world shared with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and ‘hobbits’.
THE FIRST USE OF FIRE
Darwin described the discovery of fire as “probably the greatest, excepting language, ever made by man” – but how was it made?
NEANDERTHALS
The term has been used in a negative context for decades, but why do Neanderthals get such a bad rap?
EARLY FUNERARY PRACTICES
Mourning and remembering the dead is a very ancient part of the human condition, but it may not be confined to modern or even archaic humans.
HOMO SAPIENS
How our understanding of human origins has developed over the centuries, from the Great Chain of Being to modern theories.
PREHISTORIC ART
The discovery of the first cave art shattered nineteenth-century perceptions that the people of that era were primitive savages.
EARLY SEAFARERS
The oldest-known boats are only around 12,000 years old, but seafaring could predate the emergence of modern humans.
EARLY METALLURY
For most of their existence, humans made tools from stone and bone. How did they learn about copper, bronze, and iron?