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by Boomert - The Bone Readers: Atoms, Genes and the Politics of Australia’s Deep Past by Claudio Tuniz 12 Jan 2010
If you’ve ever been puzzled by the controversy surrounding debates about the prehistoric evolution of humankind, then Bone Readers is a must-read for you. Concentrating on the controversies about the prehistoric remains of early humans found in the Australian desert, this book charts the various theories and counter-theories about where humanity came from and how it evolved. Was, for example, the world populated by a mass migration out of Africa, or did humanity arise in different areas of the world—such as Australia? At the core of this debate is science’s constantly improving capacity to date human remains. Rather than science providing a single objective answer, we find manifold arguments and competing debates, politically driven claims and counter-claims and scientific evidence challenged and re-examined. Bone Readers does tells us that science doesn’t always have irrefutable answers, and that scientists themselves are often under pressures from beyond their disciplines to come up with concrete answers to difficult questions. The problem this book has is that it doesn’t adequately marry its hard science with the narrative drive it is trying to formulate. What you get is an often disjointed read that has trouble getting going.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine (March 2009, Vol 88, No 6.) is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2009, Thorpe-Bowker.

Author Biography: Claudio Tuniz
Claudio Tuniz is a world renowned expert in geochronology and Assistant Director of UNESCO's International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Italy. Richard Gillespie is researcher at the University of Oxford and the University of Arizona. Cheryl Jones is an internationally known science journalist.

Recent books by Claudio Tuniz » View all books by Claudio Tuniz

Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Hardback (February 2010)

Bone Readers, Paperback (September 2009)

Bone Readers, Paperback (March 2009)

Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Hardback (March 1998)