"Today's pace of research and discovery in physical anthropology is so great that professional articles on the subject rapidly go out of date. For example, today's answers to the question, 'What is man?' are framed in a perspective of geological time undreamed of little more than a dozen years ago. This book of many recent articles attempts to meet the need of bringing together the latest pertinent research by exposing the reader to the work of anthropologists as well as influential work done by scholars in fields such as paleontology, physiology, and psychology. The editors have structured this representative research in such a way as to bring a better understanding to the reader of human evolution. The book considers the role man's primate relatives played, and the limitations and insights gained from the evolutionary approach. It also examines the direct evidence of the human past, and the origin and meaning of differences in living humans."--Back cover.