For the second time, a book written by Penn Staters Alan Walker and Pat Shipman has won a national award. Their book, The Ape in the Tree; A Natural and Intellectual History of Proconsul, was published by Harvard University Press in 2005. The book was awarded the 2009 W.W. Howells Book Award administered by the Biological Anthropology section of the American Anthropological Association.
Written for a general audience, the book offers unique insider's perspective on the unfolding discovery of a crucial link in our evolution: Proconsul, a fossil ape named whimsically after a performing chimpanzee called Consul.
The Ape in the Tree is written in the voice of Alan Walker, whose involvement with Proconsul began when his graduate supervisor analyzed the tree-climbing adaptations in the arm and hand of this extinct creature. Today, Proconsul is the best-known fossil ape in the world.
The history of ideas is set against the vivid adventures of Walker's fossil-hunting expeditions in remote regions of Africa, where the team met with violent thunderstorms, dangerous wildlife, and people isolated from the Western world. Analysis of the thousands of new Proconsul specimens they recovered provides revealing glimpses of the life of this last common ancestor between apes and humans.
The attributes of Proconsul have its profound implications for the very definition of humanness. This book speaks not only of an ape in a tree but also of the ape in our tree.
In 1997, the husband and wife team won the prestigious Rhône-Poulenc Award for The Wisdom of the Bones ( Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.) A Royal Society and MacArthur fellow, Walker is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also an Evan Pugh Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Biology at Penn State. Shipman is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the author of ten books. She is an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Penn State.
The W. W. Howells Book Award has been given annually since 1993 to honor books that achieve the highest standard of scholarship and readability while bringing findings in biological anthropology to a wider audience.
Written for a general audience, the book offers unique insider's perspective on the unfolding discovery of a crucial link in our evolution: Proconsul, a fossil ape named whimsically after a performing chimpanzee called Consul.
The Ape in the Tree is written in the voice of Alan Walker, whose involvement with Proconsul began when his graduate supervisor analyzed the tree-climbing adaptations in the arm and hand of this extinct creature. Today, Proconsul is the best-known fossil ape in the world.
The history of ideas is set against the vivid adventures of Walker's fossil-hunting expeditions in remote regions of Africa, where the team met with violent thunderstorms, dangerous wildlife, and people isolated from the Western world. Analysis of the thousands of new Proconsul specimens they recovered provides revealing glimpses of the life of this last common ancestor between apes and humans.
The attributes of Proconsul have its profound implications for the very definition of humanness. This book speaks not only of an ape in a tree but also of the ape in our tree.
In 1997, the husband and wife team won the prestigious Rhône-Poulenc Award for The Wisdom of the Bones ( Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.) A Royal Society and MacArthur fellow, Walker is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also an Evan Pugh Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Biology at Penn State. Shipman is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the author of ten books. She is an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Penn State.
The W. W. Howells Book Award has been given annually since 1993 to honor books that achieve the highest standard of scholarship and readability while bringing findings in biological anthropology to a wider audience.
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