Throughout her new book, Road Through Time, Mary Soderstrom draws frequent comparisons between her own work and Jack Kerouac’s 1957 classic novel, On the Road. According to Soderstrom, Kerouac’s book is “emblematic of the romance of the road, of inviting paths taken or not taken … [a] sprawling chronicle of a hipster’s wanderings.” The subtitle of Soderstrom’s book—“The Story of Humanity on the Move”—of course portends a preoccupation that is startlingly at odds with Kerouac’s personal spiritual…
Renée Hetherington
Renée Hetherington’s most recent book is Living in a Dangerous Climate: Climate Change and Human Evolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
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Renée Hetherington
Paleoanthropologists, and some evolutionary ecologists, study the prehistory of our human past, take the stuff of excavations—ancient skulls, fossil bones, stone tools—and create a narrative, or theory, to fit it. This is a long-standing practice. And now, there is a new theory that is sure to draw both criticism and acclaim. It comes from Clive…