Reddit reviews Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature

I just start reading Written In Stone by Brian Switek, so far I'm really enjoying it. It's about paleontology, evolution, and how that relates to humans. Another amazing book in a similar vain is Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, inspired a tattoo for me.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC050.html

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB925.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/illustr.html

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/faqs.html


http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/

Some books:

Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature by Brian Switek

Primate and Human Evolution (Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology) by Susan Cachel

The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans by G. J. Sawyer, Viktor Deak, Esteban Sarmiento and Richard Milner

The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors by Ann Gibbons (Apr 10, 2007)

Evolution For Dummies

Also see the books (and other resources) on evolution in our FAQ, and also the resources in the /r/atheistgems FAQ

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edit: Oh, you might find this graphic I made interesting - it's of the evolution of brain size in humans (Homo).

There's a link to another graph at the bottom of that post that also includes Australopithecines, which uses color effectively (it's not on the log-scale though).

The brain sizes in the leftmost fossils in that second display completely overlap modern chimpanzee brain sizes (300-500 cc).

So over 3 million years or so, you see our ancestors brain sizes - through a number of species - go from pretty much exactly the size of a modern chimp's brain, to four times that volume, and then drop back a little (yes, our brains are actually smaller on average than our ancestors brains from a few tens of thousands of years ago).