Gift-filter: Prehistory books for adults

July 19, 2024 10:40 AM

Looking for any well written and engaging books about prehistoric life! The person this is for is particularly interested in the Cambrian explosion, but is also digging any science regarding the history of life. It's a new interest for them that I'm super happy to fuel with fun reads, but I'm not sure what to recommend!

Based on this person's other likes, I think a book that feels like a Radiolab episode (as opposed to a dry college textbook) would be a hit.

posted by It Was Capitalism All Along to Science & Nature (12 answers total)

Best answer: I just finished Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, and I liked it. It's about the evolution of life and how that informs the anatomy of current creatures, including humans. Author is a paleontologist, but it also covers developmental biology, genetics, and taxonomy. Aimed at a popular audience, solid introduction to the concepts it covers.
posted by momus_window at 10:51 AM on July 19, 2024 [2 favorites]

Best answer: The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us and The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, both by Steve Brusatte.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 11:42 AM on July 19, 2024 [2 favorites]

Best answer: It's been a long time since I read it, but I remember enjoying Life: An Unauthorised Biography by Richard Fortey. It looks as if it was published in the US under the title Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth.

I'm not familiar with Radiolab, but perhaps this review quote from the cover of my paperback edition will be helpful in gauging the tone:

This is not a book for people who like science books. It is a book for people who love books, and life... Fortey quotes Goethe: "I am here to wonder". He has written a wonderful book. (Tim Radford, in the Guardian.)

While I was looking (unsuccessfully) for the review that was pulled from, I ran across a much more recent review of a different book, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth by Henry Gee. "It wasn’t as if eukaryotes looked at their calendars, and, seeing that it was 825 million years ago, unanimously decided to become multicellular." Sounds like fun! And the other books mentioned in that review might be worth a look too.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 1:33 PM on July 19, 2024

Wonderful Life's classic [g]
posted by HearHere at 1:42 PM on July 19, 2024 [3 favorites]

Seconding The Rise and Reign of Mammals. You might consider Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday.
posted by sizeable beetle at 2:32 PM on July 19, 2024 [3 favorites]

Wonderful Life has a big problem in that almost all of the science in it has been disproved - the book's a menace at this point.
A good explanation of why, and which necessarily covers the same ground, is palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution ( although his conclusions are also being subjected to heavy criticism - not for disagreeing with Gould though)
posted by thatwhichfalls at 3:34 PM on July 19, 2024

First Steps by Jerry DeSilva! Great history of the evolution of bipedalism in hominids!
posted by mskyle at 3:58 PM on July 19, 2024

Alan Weisman’s “The World Without us” is nominally the complete opposite of a history book in that it discusses what would become of the planet over short medium and very long term future, should humanity vanish from the picture. Apart from being a great read it would suit people who are interested in a zoomed out perspective of life on Earth.
posted by rongorongo at 5:05 PM on July 19, 2024

I can never get enough of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything; there's an audiobook of it that I listened to until the iPod it was on finally permanently bit the dust. Not 100% restricted to what you're describing, but it passes the vibe check enough that I thought I should chime in.
posted by adekllny at 5:29 PM on July 19, 2024 [1 favorite]

Wild New World is a deep time history of North America.
posted by Constance Mirabella at 10:24 PM on July 19, 2024

Best answer: I myself haven't read it but my sister went wild after reading Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art and ended up touring sites with the writer in a small group last year.
posted by janey47 at 1:18 AM on July 20, 2024 [1 favorite]

Perhaps tangential to the subject, but John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World is a very fine book about the earth’s geology, and the world in which life was born and grew. Might be worth considering.
posted by McCoy Pauley at 6:49 AM on July 21, 2024