Arcadia Public Library

Ten species that changed our world! For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors depended on wild plants and animals for survival. They were hunter-gatherers, consummate foraging experts, but taking the world as they found it. Then a revolution occurred - our ancestors' interaction with other species changed. They began to tame them. The human population boomed; civilisation began. In this book, Alice Roberts uncovers the amazing deep history...

Draws on history, archaeology, anthropology, and twenty-first-century ideas in biology to explain domestication as an evolutionary process.

Bondar examines the sex lives of our animal cousins, which are fiendishly difficult, infinitely varied, and often violent. They involve razor sharp penises, murderous cannibals, and chemical warfare in an epic battle between the sexes. Like us, animals must first find the perfect partner. You think we have it tough? Try having to do it while being hunted down by predators, against a backdrop of unpredictable or life-threatening conditions. Then, sperm...

The 50 animals include the horse, dog, rat, whale, reindeer, beaver, flea, leech, dodo, falcon, oyster and shark. These creatures, great and small, have played central roles in the evolution of humankind, but they have remained at the periphery of our understanding of history. Whether it is an advancement in scientific knowledge, a trade war, disease and death, battles won and lost, or encounters with explorers in unknown lands, these animals have...

'How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets, and naturalists for ages,' writes Susan Orlean. Since the age of six, when Orlean wrote and illustrated a book called Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon, she's been drawn to stories about how we live with animals, and how they abide by us. Now, in On Animals, she examines animal-human relationships through the compelling tales she has written over the course of her celebrated career....

"New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal explores sex and gender in both humans and other animals. Though many scholars now argue that gender differences are purely a product of socialization, primatologist Frans de Waal illustrates in Different the scientific, evolutionary basis for gender differences in humans, drawing on his decades of experience working with our closest ape relatives: chimpanzees and bonobos....