Taking us back roughly 45 million years into the Eocene, "the dawn of recent life," Chris Beard, a world-renowned expert on the primate fossil record, offers a tantalizing new perspective on our deepest evolutionary roots. In a fast-paced narrative full of vivid stories from the field, he reconstructs our extended family tree, showing that the first anthropoids—the diverse and successful group that includes monkeys, apes, and humans—evolved millions of years earlier than was previously suspected and emerged in Asia rather than Africa.

In The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey, Beard chronicles the saga of two centuries of scientific exploration in search of anthropoid origins, from the early work of Georges Cuvier, the father of paleontology, to the latest discoveries in Asia, Africa, and North America's Rocky Mountains. Against this historical backdrop, he weaves the story of how his own expeditions have unearthed crucial fossils—including the controversial primate Eosimias—that support his compelling new vision of anthropoid evolution. The only book written for a wide audience that explores this remote phase of our own evolutionary history, The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey adds a fascinating new chapter to our understanding of humanity's relationship to the rest of life on earth.

Preface

Chapter One. Missing Links and Dawn Monkeys
Chapter Two. Toward Egypt’s Sacred Bull
Chapter Three. A Gem from the Willwood
Chapter Four. The Forest in the Sahara
Chapter Five. Received Wisdom
Chapter Six. The Birth of a Ghost Lineage
Chapter Seven. Initial Hints from Deep Time
Chapter Eight. Ghost Busters
Chapter Nine. Resurrecting the Ghost
Chapter Ten. Into the African Melting Pot
Chapter Eleven. Paleoanthropology and Pithecophobia

Notes
Bibliography

Chris Beard is Curator and Head, Section of Vertebrate Paleontology, Carnegie Museum of Natural History and winner of a MacArthur "genius" grant.

"This could be the ultimate book on our origins. For the first time, Chris Beard sheds light on a hitherto little-known yet highly controversial area of paleontology—the search for the ancestry of monkeys, apes and, ultimately, humans."—Henry Gee, author of In Search of Deep Time

"Beard's book is the Lucy of anthropoid origins--an adventure story of scientific discovery in exotic places that introduces the reader to some interesting personalities of primate paleontology."—John G. Fleagle, author of Primate Adaptation and Evolution

"The search for our origins does not stop with the first member of our own species, or even the first ape that stood upright. Our earliest primate ancestors also bequeathed us many of our most important features. Chris Beard offers a fascinating, personal survey of what we know about these delicate creatures, who ultimately gave rise to ourselves."—Carl Zimmer, author of Soul Made Flesh and Evolution

"Chris Beard's exciting fossil discoveries and his bold new ideas show us that our very early origins were in Asia and not, as previously thought, in Africa."—Alan Walker, coauthor of The Wisdom of the Bones

Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, Phi Beta Kappa Society

W. W. Howells Book Award, American Anthropological Association