Dragons' Teeth and Thunderstones

Dragons' Teeth and Thunderstones - Ken McNamara ***

This is a unique book. There are plenty of titles out there on fossils, and this book has fossils at its heart - but it's not really about them. It is, rather, an exploration of humanity's attempts to understand what fossils are and what (if anything) they might do for us. As the subtitle suggests, it's not about fossils, not about the search for fossils, but about the search for the meaning of fossils.

Ken McNamara's style is striking - stylish yet also often blunt and not at all academic in his wording, even though he is addressing this topic from an academic viewpoint. This comes across particularly strongly when he is describing a Stone Age person turning a piece of flint with a beautiful fossil embedded in it into a hand axe. As the flint was delicately chipped away, the stone worker took one chip too many, slightly damaging the fossil. McNamara comments 'Should they have had the power of speech at this stage in human evolution, would it be unreasonable to suggest that their response to this final misguided blow was an early, archaic human's version of "Oh f***!"?'

The part about 'should the have had the power of speech' underlines the most dramatic revelation here, which is emphasised on the very first page: 'People have been collecting fossils for hundreds of thousands of years...' By people, McNamara is going back further than the origin of Homo sapiens - remarkably, there is evidence of fossils being used ceremonially for longer than this.

So for originality and insight this should be a five star review. The approach is engaging and different. The revelation of the vast length of time fossils have been collected is remarkable. However, I do have to limit my enthusiasm, because the trouble is that after a while it all gets a little samey. This is in part because the uses made of fossils (for example as magical protection) seem to have been fairly consistent over the millennia, and similarly the fossils used were mostly from a very small group: fish teeth, fossilised sea urchins and ammonites, plus a couple of shellfish types, make up the vast majority of the finds.

I don't want to put anyone who is interested in fossils off this book. I think you will learn new things about mankind's attitude to fossils and how they have been used - and McNamara's style is refreshing and genuinely different. However, equally, it does feel quite repetitive in its topics, which in the end dragged down its star rating.

Hardback:

Bookshop.org

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

Search This Blog