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 sug...

When I was young, my main exposure to popular science was through my Dad's collection of Pelican paperbacks, where academics expounded on the likes of animals without backbones or some archeological wonder such as Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb or Schliemann's adventures uncovering Troy. On the whole I preferred the archaeology titles, as they tended to have more of a story - but when I read Thinking Big , I was plunged back into that world. The topic helps - we've got a combination of archaeology, palaeontology and psychology here - but there's also something about the feel of the book. The authors are generally rather serious about what they're doing, there's that same small, finicky print and the reader does have to work reasonably hard to get much out of it. Part of the difficulty is that the thread of the book is quite meandering and the underlying science sometimes feels distinctly vague. At the core is the 'social brain ...

I've read a good few novels that attempt to provide edutainment - to work as a good story while simultaneously providing the reader with the kind of interesting information about science you might find in a popular science book. Most don't work at all. Either they fall over on the fiction writing, painfully lathering on the facts and writing amateurish prose, or they are so science-light that they are, in effect just straightforward hard science fiction, perhaps with a 'science behind the story' at the back. This title by Wallace Kaufman and David Deamer, I would say, is the best I've ever read in terms of achieving a balance of the two. In the Hunt for FOXP5 we meet genetics professor Michelle Murphy and her extremely intelligent daughter Avalon (yes, really), adopted from a Kazakhstan orphanage, the way you do. In a mix of archeology, genetics and nationalist political intrigue we get a feel for how the FOXP2 gene may have resulted in human language abili...

A long time ago, the archaeological world was turned on its head by  Stonehenge Decoded , a book by an astronomer that suggested Stonehenge was a complex astronomical calculator. The archaeologists didn’t seem too pleased at the intervention of an outsider, but they did eventually take on some of the ideas from the book (it seems to be accepted that other of the ideas were taking astronomical alignments too far). The same thing seems to have happened with some aspects of Robert Bauval’s theories, excellently laid out in the highly readable  The Egypt Code . In that book, Bauval put forward astronomical explanations for the positions and alignments of many Egyptian structures (including the great pyramids), and even for special shafts in the structures that allowed for certain sightings to be taken. Once again, the initial reaction was dismissal, but since then the Egyptologists seem to have grudgingly accepted some of the astronomical data, while still leaving some of ...

Many years ago there was a wonderful picture book for adults called  Motel of the Mysteries  (see at  Amazon.co.uk  and  Amazon.com ). Its premise was that a post-apocalyptic future civilization dug up a 20th century motel and treated it as the Victorians treated Egyptian discoveries (it’s no coincidence that this was the Toot ‘n Come On motel). I can’t remember a lot of it in detail (I lost my copy around the time I left university) but it included a careful interpretation of the religious significance of the strip of paper placed around the toilet seat to show it had been cleaned. What really came across in that book was how easy it was to apply wild speculation in interpreting archaeological finds. Where this is pretty rare now,  The Zodiac of Paris  tells of a similar situation happening for real in Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic France, when a number of ‘zodiacs’ from Dendera and elsewhere in Egypt were subjected to the most amazing range of in...

When this book dropped onto the doormat, my first inclination was to dump it in the bin labelled “new age garbage.” But I am very glad I didn’t. Robert Bauval came to fame over 10 years ago with the theory that the great pyramids represent the three stars of Orion’s belt, and that shafts in the pyramids align with historical star positions – that the function of these incredible structures was very much as part of a star and sun oriented religion rather than simply as fancy tombs. Now he takes his ideas much further. One quick consideration – should this book even be on a popular science website? In a word, yes. Although archaeology studies historical subjects, it is itself a science – doubly so here, where both archaeology and astronomy come into play. I have to confess to a weakness for books of this kind. I have had on my shelves since my late teens two books of absolute rubbish which are nonetheless delightful because they have the same sort of appeal. They are  The O...