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OverviewFrom cave paintings to the latest Siberian finds, woolly mammoths have fascinated people across Europe, Asia, and North America for centuries. Remains of these enormous prehistoric animals were among the first fossils to be recognized as such, and they have played a crucial role in the birth and development of paleontology. In this lively, wide-ranging look at the fate of the mammoth, Claudine Cohen reanimates this large mammal with heavy curved tusks and shaggy brown hair through its history in science, myth, and popular culture. Cohen uses the mammoth and the theories that naturalists constructed around it to illuminate wider issues in the history of science, showing how changing views about a single object reveal the development of scientific methods, practices, and ideas. How are fossils discovered, reconstructed, displayed, and interpreted? What stories are told about them, by whom, and how do these stories reflect the cultures and societies in which they are told? To find out, Cohen takes us on a grand tour of the study of mammoth remains, from England, Germany, and France to Russia and America, and from the depths of Africa to the frozen frontiers of Alaska and Siberia, where intact mammoth corpses have been discovered in the permafrost. Along the way, she shows how paleontologists draw on myth and history, as well as on scientific evidence, to explore the deep history of the earth and of life. Cohen takes her history from the sixteenth century right up to the present, when researchers are using molecular biology to retrieve mammoth DNA, calling up dreams of cloning the mammoth and one day seeing herds of woolly mammoths roaming the frozen steppes. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Claudine Cohen , William Rodarmor , William RodarmorPublisher: The University of Chicago Press Imprint: University of Chicago Press Edition: 2nd ed. Dimensions: Width: 1.60cm , Height: 0.20cm , Length: 2.30cm Weight: 0.567kg ISBN: 9780226112923ISBN 10: 0226112926 Pages: 336 Publication Date: 02 April 2002 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsReviewsSome groping attempts to tell the history of paleontology through a mammoth's eyes have been made before, but only as a lick and promise, and largely by amateur enthusiasts with (perhaps) adequate knowledge of fossils, but little understanding of the subtleties or larger contexts in the history of science. But, in this truly pathbreaking book, the mammoth has finally met its match in Claudine Cohen. - from the Foreword by Stephen Jay Gould Author InformationClaudine Cohen teaches the history of science at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She is the author or coauthor of La Genese de Telliamed: Theorie de la terre et histoire naturelle a l'aube des Lumieres; Boucher de Perthes: Les Origines romantiques de la prehistoire, and L'Homme des origines: Savoirs et fictions en prehistoire. She is currently writing a new book about women in prehistory and preparing (with Andre Wakefield) the first English edition of Leibniz's Protogaea. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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