快猫短视频

Of course the story of evolution includes human beings, but we must keep in mind that it is not about us. That warning about the dangers of teleology 鈥� and hubris 鈥� comes in the final pages of an engrossing book, Life on a Young Planet by Andrew Knoll (Princeton University Press, $18.95/拢12.50). Knoll tells a stunning tale that spans 3 billion years, weaving back and forth across the globe from chilly Spitsbergen to Guizhou Province, China, where he searches out the 鈥渕ost exquisite fossils鈥� in the phosphate smeared across the fields.

Mapping the past occupies Lesley Adkins in Empires of the Plain (Harper Perennial, 拢8.99). The scale is orders of magnitude smaller: time measured over decades, not thousands, of years. It鈥檚 the life of soldier and adventurer Henry Rawlinson, who described himself as 鈥渦nsteady, indolent and ambitious鈥�. He seems anything but lazy: his great discovery was a Rosetta stone of an inscription above a narrow ledge half way up a mountain in Bisitun, Iran. It led him to decipher cuneiform, the chicken-scratch marks of ancient Sumeria. An erudite, adventurous tale.

Mapping of an altogether different kind occupies the University of Liverpool鈥檚 David Canter, a pioneer of criminal psychological profiling, in Mapping Murder (Virgin, 拢9.99). He introduces us to geographical profiling, where the physical traces of crimes can be plotted to reveal the webs and maps that constitute the universe of the murderer or rapist. Horrifying, yet enthralling.